Reading Islands LSGS 390S.02
The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas—islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean literature, art, and thought: colonialism, indigeneity,iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? How do island-writers figure this space and forge a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction? How do island-writers reconcile (mis)representations of tropicality and address the existential threats of rising sea levels and increasing temperatures? During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt (Haiti). We will consider how these past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean and how reading the Caribbean requires a larger, global understanding. In the mode of translation, we will read across the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone islands and see how they are, at once, related and singular.Global Spains.
MW 1:25-2:40
