Choose one of the topics listed below and write your essay in response to it. Your essay should discuss ONE course text and may not discuss the text featured in your first essay. Your assignment should include all the necessary components of an essay, including a title, a thesis statement that offers a clear idea about your central text, and a full introduction and conclusion. Your essay should offer a close analysis of your text that supports the main idea of your thesis and, therefore, the body of your essay must include and analyze quotations from the text to back up its ideas. Your essay should be 6 to 8 double-spaced pages in length and be formatted according to the latest edition of the Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide, including a complete list of works cited. Your essay must incorporate and quote directly from three scholarly, peer-reviewed secondary sources. These include academic sources such as scholarly books, journal articles, theory, and criticism of your primary text. Please note that non-scholarly websites, blogs, and news media do not count toward your required three sources. You may draw on sources cited in lecture to count toward this requirement but must cite the original source and not simply the lecture slide from which it comes. Those who do not contain the minimum three scholarly, peer-reviewed sources will not meet the minimum requirements of the assignment and will receive a failing grade. Topics Consider how one of our course texts thinks about violence, especially what we’ve dealt with as slow or non-spectacular violence that doesn’t always reveal itself to our perception. How does the text foreground violence that may go unnoticed in everyday experience? What aspects of everyday experience in this text are depicted as violence, what tactics does the text use to emphasize their violence despite how they may appear commonplace, and what are their harmful effects? What does sexuality do and how does it resist or reinforce specific power dynamics we have addressed in this course. Looking at one text on the course and its depictions of sexuality or sexual identity, consider how it intersects with notions of power. How does the text figure sex and sexuality as markers of power relations? Be sure to be specific in your essay about what kinds of power dynamics (i.e., colonial, racial, gendered) sexuality resists or reinforces. A number of the literatures on our course highlight moments or spaces of transition. Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, for example, offers narratives that cross the transition between life and death. Galgut’s “The Follower” and its narrator are preoccupied with a journey, which is itself a kind of transition, at the moment of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Focusing on one text on the course, comment on the significance of transitional moments or spaces. Your paper should highlight a specific type of transition (i.e., bodily, identity-related, national, or social), and comment on how the text’s depiction of it comments upon or reframes its dominant themes, perspectives, or politics. Our course has focused disproportionately on histories of violence, but consider as well moments of pleasure, beauty, joy, and care. While this should not be an invitation to uncritically overlook histories of violence, how do histories of joy and pleasure participate in decolonial, postcolonial, or anticolonial work that may otherwise be responding to a history of violence? How do things like pleasure, joy, beauty, and care operate in your chosen text and what do they respond to or redress? In communication with your instructor, develop your own essay topic.