How do early modern texts, images, and maps contribute to — or resist — colonization and extractivism? How are notions of ’nature’ and the ‘wild’ or ’savage’ mobilised in justifying the exploitation of land and indigenous peoples, and what symbolic and rhetorical strategies are used to unpick and unsettle these? What bodies do we find represented in the texts and images of the period, and how? Which voices do we hear in texts about indigenous peoples, and which voices are missing? This course aims to decenter the European colonial perspective, by developing a critical approach that attends to dissenting voices that can be heard in literary texts of the period. Starting with the critique of colonization in relation to utopia in Rabelais, we will read fiction and poetry (Navarre, Labé, The Island of Hermaphrodites), travel writing (Cartier, Léry), theatre (Les Portugais infortunés, Racine) and philosophical discourses and dialogues (Montaigne, Diderot) that are concerned with questions of the body (sex/gender, dehumanisation, racialisation) central to the functioning of colonization. We will study in close detail these early modern texts that engage with the destabilising questions posed by the ‘discovery’ of the ’New World’, placing them in dialogue with theoretical readings on coloniality and extractivism.
