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CS92PROD
Caribbean Poetry and Cinema: "Fields of Islands" in an Open Sea

ENGL 274
Spring 2019
Section: 01  
Certificates: Civic Engagement

In this course, we will consider poetry and cinema that make radical images, sounds, and shapes of the Caribbean as a "field of islands"--islands that presume other islands, islands of foraging, convening, gathering, and concentrating on the small, in the words of Édouard Glissant--in an open, relational sea.

We will trace how the Enlightenment installs itself in the longstanding colonial tropes that render the Caribbean as a space outside of time, outside of history, perpetually under the sun, and, were it not for machetes, filled with redundantly bursting vegetation. This course will present an array of 20th-21st century Caribbean poetics and cinemas that deviate from, challenge, escape, and mangle these tropes and their spatio-temporal unimaginativeness. And we will investigate the ways that these texts and forms make use of the figures of sea, plantation, slavery, indigeneities, uprising, marronage, desire, revolution, apocalypse, vengeance, and imagination. Concerns of nationalism, development, humanism, capitalism, and subjectivity will manifest.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Literature)
Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74%

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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