ESF 19A: Education as Self-Fashioning: Memoirs from the Margins

Course Description

This course is an exploration of a genre of writing crafted by exceptional figures from marginalized communities in modern India to articulate their pain, protest, anger and analyses: the memoir or the autobiography. Instead of reading conventional historical accounts, in this course we will chart an alternative narrative of modern India, one that emerges in the memoirs of those victimized by the oppressive structures of caste, capitalism and heteronormative patriarchy. We will read life-histories of Dalit women and men negotiating caste atrocities in India's cities and villages. We will read the very first autobiographical accounts of a domestic worker, a transgender woman, and a sex worker to emerge from India. And through these life stories, we will bring alive a distinct picture of modern India, one that will reveal the structure of its social contradictions, one that will document the struggles of the marginalized against the violence of both tradition and modernity. More broadly, this course aims at developing our sensitivity towards differences in life trajectories ¿ not only in another part of the world, but also in the lives that constitute our community at the university. It is, then, not only a critical exploration of the past, but also an invitation for a critical interrogation of our present.