Welcome!

Welcome! This is a website created for and by Wabash students who are reading non-Anglophone texts in their World Literature in Translation course. The themes of this course—political violence, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, exile, and freedom—are intertwined with each other, and they point to other issues tackled in the texts we’ll be reading this semester: neocolonialism, globalization, propaganda, gender inequality, hybridity, institutionally sanctioned violence, and terrorism. We will examine a variety of texts from all over the world to determine how people in non-Anglophone nations have defined freedom and what paths they have followed to achieve or maintain it. Is humanity trapped by powerful forces of nature, biology, and unpredictable political turns? How do we transcend laws and rules limiting our freedom? Why? Can we privilege one culture’s understanding of freedom over another? How do postcolonial authors define their identity and the identity of their nations after decades, sometimes centuries, of oppression? We will talk and write about personal freedom, freedom of nations, moral choices, human rights, class divisions, and other relevant themes.