When publishers, scholars, and critics talk about the prismatic literary and cultural traditions outside the West, they sometimes refer to them by their geographical provenance — African literature, say, or Sumerian art — or perhaps by their historical moment — Ottoman architecture, or postcolonial Indonesian poetry. More and more, the catch-all category of World Literature has begun to hold sway in influential places, and is changing the shape of how we think, learn, and write about non-Western aesthetics, as well as how we participate in our "own" complex cultures. If we can imagine a literature that truly goes under the heading of the World, what can we possibly exclude? What might we gain by using this term, and what might we lose? What histories are attached to the various names and classifications we assign to culture and how does cultural "othering" uphold or resist forms of economic, political, and military dominance? In this course we will work carefully through the history and influential writings of postcolonialism as a method designed to challenge to hegemonic forms of representation, cultural production, and study. In the second half of the semester, we will turn our attention to the historical underpinnings and current critics of World Literature.