How has France's colonial legacy shaped the city of Paris? Where should we look to grasp the complexities of colonial and postcolonial history in the contemporary city? 

This course addresses these questions through a combination of observation and exploration, reading and watching. It combines fieldwork where you will develop different methods to reach your own analysis of the city with explicitly fictional material and creative documentary material to consider what is involved in grasping the 'realities' of postcolonial dynamics. 

The first half of the course takes a particular interest in repressed histories, in the ways in which authors and film-makers have sought to make this repression manifest, to give voice or presence to the silence. The second half of the course focuses on new modes of expressivity, on cultures of performance and adaptation, with a particular focus on the way women have claimed new visibilities in filmic and literary production.