Postcolonialism: PhD Exams Reading List
Primary Texts
African Authors
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
Ba, Mariama. So Long a Letter.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.. Purple Hibiscus.
Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians.
—. Disgrace.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions: A Novel.
Djebar, Assia. So Vast the Prison.
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood.
—. Second Class Citizen.
Gordimer, Nadine. The Burgher’s Daughter.
Head, Bessie. A Question of Power.
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road.
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman.
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Devil on the Cross.
Sembene, Ousman. God’s Bits of Wood.
Nwapa, Flora. Efuru.
Tutoula, Amos. The Palm-wine Drinkard.
Aidoo, Ama Ata. Our Sister Killjoy.
Caribbean
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. The Arrivants.
Cliff, Michelle. Abeng.
—. No Telephone to Heaven
Conde, Maryse. Crossing the Mangrove.
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack, Monkey.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy.
Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin.
Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment.
—. The Dragon Can’t Dance
Naipaul, V.S. A bend in the River.
—. A House for Mr. Biswas
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea.
Selvon, Sam. Moses Ascending.
Edgell, Zee.Time and the River.
South Asian Authors (Including South Asian diaspora)
Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable.
Desai, Anita. Baumgartner’s Bombay.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines.
Kureishi, Hanif. My Beautiful Laundrette.
—. Buddha of Suburbia.
Lahiri, Jumpa. The Namesake.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine.
Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance.
Narayan, RK. Waiting for the Mahatma.
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children.
—. The Satanic Verses
Sidwa, Baspi. Cracking India.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan.
Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World.
Chughtai, Ismat. The Crooked Line.
Hussain, Abdullah. The Weary Generations.
Hyder, Qurratulain. River of Fire.
Middle Eastern Authors
Mahfouz, Naguib. Children of the Alley.
Saadawi, Nawal El. Woman At Point Zero.
Salih, Al-Tayyib. Season of Migration to the North.
Alifa Rifaat. Distant View of the Minaret and Other Stories.
Latin American Authors
Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits.
Alvarez, Julia. In The Time of Butterflies.
Marquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Secondary Texts
Foucault (Archeology of Knowledge). Derrida (Of Grammatology), Roland Bathes (Mythologies), Delueze (Anti Oedipus); Parth Chatterjee (Nation and its Fragments), Dipesh Chkarabarty (Provincializing Europe). Jameson (Politcal Unconscious); Eagleton (After Theory); Marx (The Communist Manifesto and “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.
Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration.
—. The Location of Culture
Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism.
Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.”
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.
—. Black Skin, White Mask
Studies in a Dying Colonialism
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire.
James, CLR.. The Black Jacobins.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism.
McClintock, Ann. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism.”
—. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Border.
Mohanty, Russo and Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.
Nasta, Sushila ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia.
Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.
Said, Edward. Orientalism.
—. Culture and Imperialism
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
—. Other Asias
—. The Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Spur, David. The Rhetoric of Empire.
Young, Robert JC. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.
—. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West
You might also want to take a look at some of my postcolonial literature courses.