This course intersects contemporary Caribbean poetics and decolonial thought to examine the Caribbean as a paradigmatic site of “trans-modernity” (Enrique Dussel; Walter Mignolo). The site of slave revolts, revolutions, and maroon communities, the Caribbean archipelagos has given rise to a “poetics of relation” (Édouard Glissant) that rewrites the history of modernity as a history of connections and affiliations between cultures and collectivities whose larger horizon is not Euro-America but rather “planetarity” (Gayatri Spivak)..Read more about Decolonial Approaches to Contemporary Caribbean Writing: Narratives of Dispossession, Migration and Return
COURSE DESCRIPTIONTheory of Culture invites students to critically examine the ways by which contemporary philosophical and theoretical discourses have challenged the representation of western culture as the epitome of all cultures. The course opens with a critical exegesis of the Black Atlantic as the thick network of colonial modernity, which is consolidated on board of the slave ships and on the slave plantations that sprawl across the Caribbean islands and the Americas (Course Unit 1).
