This course will typically consider four or five English-language contemporary texts from different regions of the globe such as Roy’s The God of Small Things, Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracle’s at Little No Horse, Eggers’s What is the What, and Thompson’s Habibi or other selected texts. Our critique of (self)consciously politicized boundaries will involve exploring the thesis that newer national agendas reproduce colonial missions, the tension between ideology and aesthetics, and how the politically-charged management of literary production, dissemination, and criticism discredits (or works to ignore) the literary nature of a work in and of itself. Particular attention will be paid to narratology and the phenomenology of reading when assessing the conscientious representation of themes including caste, motherhood, women, beautification, poverty, waste, untouchability, hate, desire, tourism, exile, emigration, performance, holiness, scandal, and nostalgia in texts, such as those listed above, depicting such far-flung places as Christian India, a native North American reserve, war-torn Sudan, and a romanticized (and timeless) Middle-East.