Course Description
Summary
To date, the Afrocaribbean world has produced some of the most essential poetry, fiction, and scholarship of the Americas. Poets like the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite also double as social scientists, as Brathwaite’s Development of Creole Society in Jamaica illuminates a picture of the linguistic development of Jamaica under British colonial rule. Similarly, Glissant’s idea of “creolization,” a critique of capitalist globalization, invites us to imagine the fragmentary politics of the Caribbean as a blueprint for the rest of the world. In this survey of 1900s Afrocaribbean literature, we will dip our toes equally into the rich literary constructions of Cesaire, Una Marson, and fiction Claude McKay (as a few examples), as well as into the cultural criticism of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and others. Weekly reading will average 50-75 pages per week, and students will work towards the completion of a single critical essay of about 15 pages throughout the semester.
