ENGLIT 2320 - CARIBBEAN ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATIONS

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
What do our postcolonial and global solidarities invite us to learn about places in the global south? How might we situate our scholarship in dialogue with such places and with their cultural and intellectual histories? How can thinking about the specificities of place deepen our theoretical generalizations? And how does postcolonial studies itself change if we think from the perspective of islands and archipelagoes rather than subcontinents and continents? Since the Caribbean (and the New World more broadly) were key to the making of capitalist modernity, we will address the above questions by exploring the environmental imaginations of Caribbean literature as it responds to the inextricably linked (post)colonial histories of extractivist, environmental, and epistemic violence. Caribbean writers have found extraordinarily inventive and wide-ranging ways to navigate both archival erasures and dominant representations of the Caribbean as picturesque paradise or as place of tragedy or disaster. We will study their environmental maneuvers across several different genres and forms--from realism to speculative fiction to epic to satire, from theater to literary essays to allegory to "small" forms such as the vignette, the fragment, patwa proverbs and creole voicings, short ekphrastic poems, and postcards. We will explore the affordances of each genre for framing and resolving environmental considerations: what vocabularies for environmental witnessing and repair do particular genres offer? How do they approach problems of representation, knowledge, agency, and political desire? For example, how might the politics of water be treated differently in a realist novel, a found poem drawn from a newspaper article, a postcard, and a visual poem? Our readings will focus on the Anglophone Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean diaspora. Writers will include Nobel laureate Derek Walcott; Jamaican poet laureates Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior; Kei Miller; Marlene NourbeSe; Jacques Roumain; and Aliyah Khan. Our theoretical interlocutors include Michel-Rolph Truillot, Rob Nixon, Isabel Hofmeyr, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Yarimar Bonilla, Deborah Thomas. Assignments will include a presentation; exploratory, academic, and public writing; and short writing exercises in different genres.
Academic Career: Graduate
Course Component: Seminar
Grade Component: Grad LG/SNC Basis

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