Engl 132: Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture

This undergraduate General Education examines how gender and sexuality have been imagined and re-imagined in contemporary writing from locations within the Black Diaspora: that is, Africa and the Americas. What does it mean, according to writers from specific places at specific times, to be a man? A woman? To fall in love? To seek a mate? To raise a child? In the class, our aim is both to appreciate the literature on its own terms, and to investigate how the literature interacts with the world: how do texts reinforce what we already “know” about gender and sexuality, and how do they trouble our existing assumptions?

Engl 200 Intro to Literary Studies

This writing-intensive undergraduate course is designed to introduce students to the study of literature in English at the university level. Through the study of various modern literary texts, we try

• to grasp the basics of a range of critical approaches (that is, ways to talk and write about literature)
• to explore the conventions and possibilities of a range of genres (fiction, poetry and drama)
• to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills, through a variety of in-class and take-home assignments

Engl 300 Caribbean Women Writers

In this writing-intensive undergraduate course we study women writers whose work spans the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking literatures of the Caribbean (all texts are read in English), as well as addressing immigrant experiences in North America. The core group of texts, and related critical/theoretical essays, ground our explorations of race, gender, culture and immigration; we also discuss the writers’ differing evocations of home, family, belonging, love, and work.

Engl 300 Caribbean Revolutions and Their Afterlives

Focusing primarily on Cuba and Haiti, this course encourages thinking about the ways (post)revolutionary Caribbean nations circulate in contemporary imaginaries in the Caribbean and the USA. Cuba and Haiti have long served as both inspirational and cautionary tales in the realm of politics, and sites of/fodder for fears and fantasies in pop-culture constructions of racialized, sexualized Caribbean “others”. These (mis-)representations of the historical and contemporary conditions experienced, and intervened in, by Haitian and Cuban people have had long lives and been broadly consumed. They therefore complicate – even impede – our understandings of Cuban and Haitian literary and cultural texts, and also of contemporary realities such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the death of Fidel Castro, the (relative, and perhaps temporary) normalizing of US-Cuban relations, and Haitians currently seeking refugee status in the USA and Canada. This course aims to facilitate students’ engaging anew with what they know, and think they know, about the (post)revolutionary Caribbean; our primary attention is focused on texts from and about Cuba and Haiti, with additional reference to Grenada.

Engl 372 Caribbean Literature

In this upper-level undergraduate course we read major works of Caribbean literature, comprising a mixture of “canonical” and emerging authors. Lectures (rare) and discussions (regular) address central themes in Caribbean writing, as well as issues of form and style (including translation, and the interplay between creole and European languages). Some of the themes that preoccupy us are history and its marks upon the Caribbean present; racial identity and ambiguity; colonial and neo-colonial relationships among countries; family relationships; gender and sexuality.

Engl 491 Autobiography of the Americas

In this upper-level undergraduate course, we read autobiographies, memoirs and essays from a variety of locations (geographical, racial, and social) across the Americas. We think, talk and write about how the autobiographical mode has been and is being used for artistic, personal and political purposes. We also ask ourselves and each other what we expect from autobiography, how we read it and why, and how those expectations are affected by what we know about the author’s identity (in other words, how do we approach a memoir by an Afro-Caribbean woman differently than a memoir by a Native American man?) We discuss matters of truth, authenticity, memory and creativity as they show up in our approaches to autobiographical texts. Finally, we wonder together about what it means to be American, within and beyond the borders of the USA, and how these texts take part in creating that identity.

Engl 494 Pulp Caribbean

This upper-level undergraduate course examines the construction of the Caribbean as an other-world characterized by tropical climate and landscape, exotic and unpredictable people, and mysterious and occult cultural practices – a perfect setting for the popular-fiction genres of mystery, romance, suspense and speculative fiction. Primary readings include both texts that explore this other-world from the perspective of an (often hapless) outsider, and those focalized from an insider (that is, Caribbean-born) perspective; we will also view a selection of films. Class discussions and assignments interrogate these categories and consider under what circumstances, and to what ends, the exotic is constructed and re-inscribed.

Engl 791 Intro to Caribbean Literature

Although not a survey, this graduate seminar is intended to provide a useful introduction to Caribbean literature. I have tried to give the reading list some historical sweep, have it represent most of the major linguistic and ethnic groupings of the region, achieve something like a gender balance, take in multiple genres, and include both canonical and emerging writers – all within eleven texts. There are several matrices within which one might place one’s readings of Caribbean texts: African Diaspora studies, New World/hemispheric American studies, postcoloniality, transnational studies, and so on. I am happy to have any and all of those inflect our discussion, but because this is an introductory course, my primary concern is that we should recognize the region’s historical specificities and its cultural complexity, and arrive at some sense of the implications thereof. Of course, concepts such as antillanité, creolité, modern blackness, creolization, plantation societies, neo-coloniality, and others with long currency in Caribbean studies will very likely find their way into our discussions, but this is not, in its design, a theory-heavy class.

Engl 891 Caribbean Family Sagas

This graduate class has its genesis in my observation that Jamaican family-saga novels frequently function in service of the ideology of creolization, which asserts racial creolization as the defining – indeed, the normative – feature of contemporary Caribbean identity. This deployment of the family-saga genre is in broad alignment with the ends which it has conventionally served in other, metropolitan spaces, as a cultural bulwark against threats to national identity and stability. Such a project would be fraught with fault-lines and contradictions in any given setting; in the highly complex field that is postcolonial (and, indeed, colonial) Caribbean identity, it rapidly reveals its limits. Thus, one finds Caribbean and other postcolonial literatures studded also with family sagas re-figured as vehicles of opposition and critique.

In this seminar, we examine a range of Caribbean novels in order to investigate how the conventions of the family saga are deployed to ease or intensify anxieties about belonging, coherence, stability, and success, and to authorize or problematize the formation of modern Caribbean nation-states – all this among contemporary subjects whose ability to claim the Caribbean as home-space is disrupted by racial alienation, fractured genealogies, and the historical traumas of colonization and slavery.

Engl 892 Caribbean Cultural Theory

In this graduate seminar (which used to be called “Theories and Problems of Caribbean Identity”) we examine elaborations and interrogations of Caribbean cultural identities, from négritude and cubanismo through antillanité, creolité and beyond. The problem of locating the Caribbean informs our discussions, as we consider the region’s position within broader postcolonial, African-diasporic, Black Atlantic and New World trajectories, and reflect on what is gained and lost by privileging these as lenses through which to make sense of Caribbean-ness. Essays by the region’s pre-eminent intellectuals on issues including colonialism, creolization, language, hybridity, gender and sexuality, and popular vs. “high” culture ground our conversations. (I also teach a 700-level, “intro” version of this course.)