Reading & Composition

Given the violent and tragic history of the Caribbean it is hardly surprising that many of the region’s greatest writers have sought to challenge historical injustice, and its legacy into the present, through literature. Some of the questions we shall consider in this course include: How does literature function as counter-history? How does writing resist historical erasure and oblivion? How do certain literary texts attempt to recover or re-imagine lost or suppressed histories? How can writing, rewriting, and “writing back” challenge or revise partial representations and misrepresentations of Caribbean history and subjectivity? And finally how does a radical engagement with the past open up new aesthetic and political possibilities for the present and future? This is a reading and writing intensive course with a research component that fulfills the second half of the University Reading & Composition requirement.

Texts: The Tempest (Shakespeare), Une Tempête (Césaire), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Condé), The Kingdom of this World (Carpentier), Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys). A course reader will include a selection of Columbus’ letters, excerpts from De las Casa’s The Devastation of the Indies, Derek Walcott’s “The Muse of History,” and additional essays and historical documents.