IAS A6000 Literature of the British West Indies
Both Henry James and James Baldwin were known for claiming that it was only through the experience of becoming estranged American ex-patriots traveling in Europe that they finally found their "American-ness." Likewise, many authors grouped within the so-called literature of the British West Indies had to leave home and migrate to Canada, the United States, and/or England to discover what it was to be "Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian." Fleeing in some cases a colonial past and in others a questionable "post" colonial present, their transplantation problematizes what it means to be 'Caribbean.' At times tinged with "magical realism, at others only starkly realist, the art drawn from these writers' encounters with the past enchants, mystifies, at times, enrages, but always deals with what it means to constantly negotiate otherness. This graduate-level seminar will introduce students to the literature of 'British' 'West Indies' and its prevalent themes: colonial and post-colonial subjectivity"; exile and return; the interweaving of gender, race and class issues in their socio-cultural context; the notion of carnival; ethnicity and language; and otherness and hybridity, to name several.
Contact Hours
3 hr./wk.