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).. Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau have recently argued that the Caribbean poetics of creolité, hybridity, and diaspora can serve as an example for a radical imaginary of alterity and relation that can transform our understanding of community, and rights in light of the growing migrations of singularities and collectivities and their persevering claims of their right to soil as well as to human and citizenship rights in the present. We will focus on the Caribbean poetics of Édouard Glissant and the theoretical essays of Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R James and will study and examine their connections with decolonial thinkers like Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Gayatri Spivak, and Enrique Dussel, among others. The theorization of the decolonial Caribbean poetics of alterity and relation will be further developed through the novels of Erna Brodber, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwige Danticat, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé and Caryl Phillips, the poetry of M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, Nancy Morejón and Joan Anim-Addo, and the documentary films and artwork of John Akomfrah and Steve McQueen.