<p>Keilexandra, we may have had this conversation before. I know you are anti-core. But if you are interested in “the Postcolonial Canon” I encourage you to get yourself some systematic background in the Dead White Men Canon, too. Trying to understand postcolonial literature without knowing the Western canon is like trying to understand Renaissance literature without knowing anything about Latin literature. It’s not like you can’t do it, but you can’t do it without missing a lot. Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie (to pick three denizens of the Postcolonial Canon) didn’t grow up reading Morrison, Garcia, and Rushdie; they read Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Flaubert, and Faulkner. And when they started writing, they didn’t compose toasts, vallenatos, or Araqi poetry. Instead, they chose that most parochially Western of forms, the novel. The postcolonial lit world exists in a complex, ongoing conversation with the European (and American) tradition, and it you don’t know that tradition then you’re listening to only one side of a dialogue between what are ultimately lovers.</p>
<p>But . . . you don’t need Yale or DS to do that. You may need a university, though. Look carefully at the faculties and course offerings of LACs. All of them are going to have someone interested in postcolonial literature on faculty, but hardly any of them will have two such someones. Maybe over the course of a couple years there will be three or four courses offered in the field. Universities with good literary studies are going to be offering 4-5 times as much.</p>