The seminar will read into one of the central pillars of contemporary theoretical work through the past decades – Postcolonial critique – which comes from Arabian, South and East Asia, Africa, as well as the social and racial periphery of the great metropolitan centers of the West.  While in the past the Eurocentric approach, with its complex episteme of Modernity and Enlightenment were at the peak of cultural practices, Postcolonial critique exposes the power structures and the ontology of Modernist practices as practices of control and exploitation which are identified with the manners through which Western cultures, through pure Narcissist interests prevented men, cultures, and social structures, which are not identified with White supremacy in the West, from controlling discourses. 

Over the course of study we will explore all classical theories identified with Postcolonial critique, including: Edward Said’s Orientalism; Homi K. Bhabha’s Mimicry, Hybridity, Ambivalence and “Third Space”; discussing women in the “Third World” through Gayatri Spivak’s writing; the passage from Marxist social critique to Freudian psychoanalytic views of the process,  etc. We shall discuss new directions and contemporary developments in the field – in African-American studies, as well as the critique further thinkers from India and Japan, as well as practices of integrating, conglomerating, and hybridizing new sources into new discourse of “postcolonial aesthetics.”