.QUESTION

Final Essay Abstract 

Submit a brief 300-word abstract explaining your intended focus and the ways the final essay will demonstrate how our course materials have changed your understanding of postcolonial queer studies (and perhaps more broadly, your worldview).

The primary task of the final essay is to consider how your initial understanding of postcolonial queer studies has changed over the course of the term based on your engagements with our readings and various assignments. The genre of your final project is up to you. It can be, for example, a reflective essay or a close reading of a passage from one of the texts. To help focus your thinking and your topic, a brief 300-word abstract explaining what you intend to discuss in your essay is required.

The final essay is simply aimed at developing and articulating your own analyses of how your ideas, thoughts, and conceptualizations of the connections among postcolonial studies and queer studies have developed and evolved over the course of the term. Since this aim has to do with your own experiences with the course materials, there is no specific topic for the essay in the sense that you may be used to for such an assignment. Part of the task of this assignment is to find and articulate your own topic and your own area of inquiry. The specific genre of your final project is up to you. It can be a reflective essay or a close reading of a passage from one of the texts. The essay should maintain a clear and consistent focus that engages with a text or texts of your choice.

There are a few things you can consider to help in this task.
*Take the time to watch your introductory video and to listen to what you have been trying to work through in the various assignments. For example, perhaps the questions you have been asking in your weekly reading notes and response exercises share an underlying theme or broader concern. If so, maybe you can identify what that that theme or concern is and use that as your primary focus.
*Perhaps there was a particular text or topic discussed in a text that was especially compelling for you. If so, maybe you can identify what, for you, is the core idea or link that calls for deeper inquiry and development (for example, maybe ‘home’ and ‘diaspora’). This can also serve as your primary focus.
*Perhaps the primary terms of the course (postcolonial and queer) are, for you, invoking connections or questions that you would like to explore in relation to how we think about and define these terms in current contexts? If so, perhaps there is a specific context that, for you, raises these questions and connections in especially salient ways. This too can serve as your primary focus.

To help get ahold of your focus and situate it, you are required to submit a brief 300-word abstract. The abstract is like a tool to help you briefly explain your intended focus and the ways the final essay will demonstrate how our course materials have changed your understanding of postcolonial queer studies (and perhaps more broadly, your worldview).

Texts we have worked on-

Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, “Defining the Terms”
Hawley, Introduction to Post-colonial Queer, Theoretical Intersections
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, “Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves”
Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, “Queer Race”
Gopinath, Impossible Desires, “Surviving Naipaul”
Kincaid, A Small Place
Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

Questions in my reading notes-
Do anticolonial thoughts and movements affect contemporary global politics and literature?
Where do we draw the line between the actions of activists with anticolonial thoughts and scholarship demonstrated through literary criticism?

Will there ever be a universal treatment of gays and lesbians in all parts of the world?
Are we able to transcend sexual nationalism and treat all people equally irrespective of their sexuality and sexual preferences?

Did Foucault’s text correctly identify and discuss the various intersections of sexuality, especially during the colonial era?
What can we draw from Foucault’s history of sexuality and how does it relate to the contemporary views on the same?
Has the current discourse on sexuality aligned with Foucault’s ideas on sexuality or has it challenged them?

“how is race historically and culturally related to gender and sexuality?”. Another question that emerged during the reading experience is; “can we define race as a biological attribute?” In other words, can we use people’s biological makeup/characteristics to categorize people into different races?

Two questions arise from a reading of Mpe’s novel:
Why would South Africans discriminate their fellow South Africans when it is for discrimination reasons that they fought for independence from the Whites?
ii. Why is it that South Africa’s leafy suburbs post-apartheid were characterized by all manner of evils, like the shattering of dreams, unpredictable costs, AIDS, suicide, and sexuality issues, when the “our Hillbrow” was used to imply a prospective future?

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