THIS IS A DRAFT

AAAS 133B: The Literature of the Caribbean

Fall 2017

Professor Faith Smith

Mon/Wed 5pm-6:20pm

This course fulfills the university’s humanities, non-western, social science, and writing intensive requirements.

This semester we take our cues from recent novels’ explicitrepresentations of sexual violence and state terror, their dispassionateattitudes to ideological commitment, and their mapping of a range of desiring subjects. We place these alongside other novels; poetry, drama and non-fiction; and visual culture. We are trying to map –

how Caribbean people register, resist and utilize assumptions about their exceptional violence, failed states, or sexual availability;

how discourses such as the “opening up of Cuba” are paradigmatic of longstanding notions about the region;

the relationship between notions of crime and safety on other places’ supply of or demand for both drugs and “order;”

how disappointment about the promise of revolution and radical transformation (Cuba, Grenada) shapes conceptions of the past and present;

representations of everyday life;

what it means to “return” to the region, what it means never to have left, and the interplay of “home” and “abroad;”

form itself: the long novel’s “brief history,” for example, presses us to ask questions about what stories and forms find popularity with a global audience, and about the novel’s fraught relationship with representation;

and finally, considering that Mario Deane, a black man, was killed by the Jamaican police in August 2014, the same month as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, we want to ask about the extent to which Black Lives Matter ought to be relevant in a predominantly black nation-state.

Texts to be drawn from the following:

Roxane Gay, An Untamed State (USA/Haiti 2014)

Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings (Jamaica/USA 2015)

Junot Diaz, A Brief History of Oscar Wao (USA/Dominican Republic 2007)

Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (Trinidad 1979)

Merle Collins, Angel (Grenada 1987)

Elizabeth Hackshaw-Walcott, Mrs. B(Trinidad 2014)

Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night(Trinidad/Canada 1996)

Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven(Jamaica 1987)

Artists:Sheena Rose (Barbados), Firelei Baez (Dominican Republic), Chris Cozier (Trinidad, Leasho Johnson (Jamaica), and Doris Salcedo (Columbia).

Film-makers: Kareem Mortimer (Bahamas), Richard Fung (Trinidad/Canada), and Perry Henzell (Jamaica).

Requirements will include presentations in paired groups periodically updating the class on an ongoing issue, discussion, or performance within the Caribbean. Tell us who is participating in the debate and through which media; the history of the issue as far as you can tell, and what seems to be at stake for various participants.

Possible grading percentages:

Attendance: 10%

Participation:10%

Presentation:10%

Latte posts:10%

First paper:15%

Second paper:15%

Final paper: 30%

Graduate Students should see me about the course’s relationship to your research goals. You are responsible for the requirements of attendance and participation, and for both short papers. Your final paper will be 18-20 pages.