This course introduces students to literary elements on the page with discussion of major theories and debates within the study of Caribbean literature and culture with a particular focus on the idea of “Chaos” (Braithwaite, Benitez-Rojo, Suzanne Césaire, Hopkinson, Browne, etc.). We will read novels, plays, poetry, and examine art and film that address the region’s unprecedented historical losses alongside its regenerative cultural production (i.e. Carnival, hip hop, ecotourism) to show how this flux shapes the modern Caribbean. We will explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, and even animality with
special interest on the figure of the diasporic body caught between home and ‘farrin’. We will survey and analyze how creatives construct both realist and speculative images that interrogate slavery, colonialism, extraction, and their afterlives into the future. This is a creative critical course with one assignment being creative writing/production. Guest speakers (artists and writer) invited to two classes.