COURSE DESCRIPTION AND GOALS:
Black and Asian British literature is a vibrant and highly dynamic field of cultural production which, in recent decades has also become a well-established and popular topic in universities and schools. But so far, attention to British multicultural spaces has mainly focused on a few large urban centres in and around London, Leeds or Manchester. Partly, this makes sense, because these places are indeed major diversity hubs. But there are people of colour in all corners of the UK, even in small and supposedly remote villages, and these non-metropolitan voices are often overlooked. Even where this oversight is unintentional, it implies that diversity is an anomaly, limited to a few big cities, while the rest of the country is still seen as a quintessentially white space. By contrast, this seminar looks beyond the big cities and examines texts from Black and Asian British literature (incl. novels for children and adults, poetry and drama, mainly from the last 20 years) that decidedly engage with rural spaces, inscribing various diasporic presences and multicultural connections into places where they might not, at first, be expected. This complicates conventional concepts of national and regional identity, diasporicity, city and country, tradition, (post)modernity and progress, to give a more nuanced picture of British diversity in the 21st century. Depending on student interests, we may also spend a little time reflecting on how such literary texts, and the issues they raise, can be included in EFL school-teaching.

SET TEXTS:
One of our set texts is Leila Aboulela’s novel Bird Summons (1st publ. 2019); this book should be purchased in advance (no prescribed edition).
The other set texts (excerpts from other longer texts, whole texts of shorter works like poems, etc.) will be made available via our online course platform Stud.IP.

COURSEWORK, CREDITS AND ASSIGNMENTS:
Requirements for passing this course and acquiring credits are:
1) Regular attendance & active participation
2) 1 graded assignment / Prüfungsleistung. In this course, this takes the form of a presentation (c.15–30 min.) with subsequent write-up (c.10 pp.)