Reading & Composition

The island is a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic and cultural boundaries: at once a fantasy land of conquest, domination, and punishment, and the site of new beginnings outside all that we know. In this course we will think together about what makes the island such a rich territory and a site of multiple (and often times contradictory!) imaginations. Through a selection (by no means exhaustive, by no means complete) of fiction, poetry, and film from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, making necessary detours in early modern European texts, we will hone our analytical writing skills by focusing on how and why islands are productive spaces from which to think about our relationship to nature, class, race, gender, knowledge, and power.