Department of English

This course will look at ways of conceptualizing, defining and situating Caribbean culture.  Is it necessarily postcolonial?  Is it a culture of resistance?  Has its extraordinary multiplicity and historical diasporas found singular modes of representation?  How does one approach its long list of great authors?  What do they say about the Caribbean as such?  Do they offer alternative views on the Americas?   The course will be taught in English but will encompass writing from the major linguistic traditions that meet in the Caribbean, a place whose contours often reach beyond the main Caribbean Archipelago to South and North American sites such as Brazil, Colombia, New York, and Miami.  We will look at major writers and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolas Guilleén, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Junot Diaz, Aime Cèsaire, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, among others.