English 165CL: Caribbean Literature

Winter 2002
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara

 


America
, c. 1600
Theodore Galle engraving, after a drawing by Jan van der Straet

     
       
 








Instructor: Rita Raley
Office: South Hall 2703

Office Hours:
T 3:30-5:30
Class: TR 11-12:15
South Hall 1415
raley@english.ucsb.edu




 This course will align the West Indies and the French islands so as to examine "Caribbean literature" with respect to language, diaspora, the colonial legacy, the slave era, racial experience, and creolization. We will begin with some examination of the early modern imagining of the uncivilized island savage--the narratives of what Tzvetan Todorov has called the "colonial encounter" in the Caribbean (emblematized by the figures of Prospero, Caliban, and Crusoe). Our historical frame of reference throughout the quarter will include the eradication of the native Caribs and Arawaks, the exportation of African slaves, and the construction of Europe as the civilized "homeland"; and our introductory reading will include Mary Prince's slave narrative and some of Aime Césaire's and Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial writing. While this historical frame of reference will be integral to our discussions, our understanding (or misunderstanding) of the cultures of Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Martinique, and other islands will come from the texts on our syllabus. We will see in the majority of our texts--novels and poetry from the late twentieth century--that this history informs the present understanding of Caribbean cultural identity.
 

Mary Prince, History of Mary Prince

Caryl Phillips, Cambridge

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending

Course Reader available at Copy Services in Davidson Library; reader selections are marked (R) on the syllabus. Reserve books are also held in Davidson.

 
     

 

Paper I, 4-5 pages (assigned topics): Due February 5 - 25%
Paper II, 5 pages (assigned topics): Due March 12 - 25%
Class participation (including close reading exercises and regular attendance*) - 20%
Final Exam (passage identification, close reading, take-home essay)
: Wednesday, March 20, 12-3 pm - 30%

* Notes
More than two unexcused absences will adversely affect your grade.
Since this course is mid-sized, it will balance lecture and student participation. You should complete all of the reading by the date it is assigned and come to class prepared to answer general and detailed questions about the texts on the syllabus.
All written work must be completed in order to pass the course.



January 8: Introduction to the Course

January 10: Christopher Columbus, selected letters and digests from the first two voyages (R); Bartolomé de Las Casas, excerpts from A Short Account of the Destruction of the West Indies (1552) (R)
* class discussion of the European imagining of the New World Native American

January 15: Mary Prince (pp. 1-38, 64-70) [complete electronic edition]
* An Introduction to the Slave Narrative (William Andrews)
* The Slave Narrative (Donna Campbell)


January 17: Caryl Phillips, Cambridge
* African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage (PBS)
* J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship (1840) [another copy]

January 22: Caryl Phillips, Cambridge

January 24: Aime Césaire, excerpts from Discourse on Colonialism (R) and Frantz Fanon, "The Negro and Language," from Black Skin, White Masks (R)
* class discussion of anti-colonial writing and Négritude movement

January 29: Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco

January 31: Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco; Derek Walcott, "A Letter to Chamoiseau" (R)

February 5: Film screening: Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba (Dir. Mikheil Kalatozishvili, 1964; 141 min.)
* Cuba reference information
* Paper due

February 7: George Lamming, "The Occasion for Speaking" and "Journey to an Expectation," from The Pleasures of Exile (R)
* The Tempest 3.2
Caliban: "Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command"

* Windrush site (BBC); Passenger list, SS Empire Windrush (1948); development of a West Indian literary community in London (BBC)


February 12: Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending
* Robinson Crusoe

February 14: Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending
* Supplementary poem: Louise Bennet, "Dear Departed Federation"

February 19: Film screening: Handsworth Songs (Dir. John Akomfrah, 1986; 61 min.)
* Suggested film screening at Campbell Hall, Life and Debt (2001): 7:30 & 9:30 pm

February 21: Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place and "Girl" (R)

February 26: Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

February 28: Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven
On the Arcadian Theme (Et in Arcadia)
1963 Birmingham Church Bombing (pp. 100-2)
Post Independence: 1972-1983
Post Independence: 1984-1993
Nanny of the Maroons (part I/part II)
Marcus Garvey

March 5: Derek Walcott, "Laventille" (R)

March 7: Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (R)

March 12: Nation Language: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (R)
* Paper due

March 14: Dub and nation language poetry: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, "The Dust"; Michael Smith, "Mi Cyaan Believe It"; John Agard, "Listen Mr. Oxford Don" and "Mek Four"; Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Five Nights of Bleeding," "Inglan is a Bitch," and "English Don"; Grace Nichols, "Invitation"; Louise Bennett, "Noh Lickle Twang"; Bob Marley, "Talkin' Blues"; Mutabaruka, "Butta Pan Kulcha" (R); Valerie Bloom, "Language Barrier"





"I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old one
a new one has sprung."

- Grace Nichols, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman

"…this particular form does not speak the Queen's English any longer. It speaks English as an international language which is quite a different thing. It speaks a variety of broken forms of English: English as it has been invaded, and as it has hegemonized a variety of other languages without being able to exclude them from it. It speaks Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-French, Anglo-German or Anglo-English indeed. It is a new form of international language, not quite the same old class-stratified, class-dominated, canonically-secured form of standard or traditional highbrow English."
- Stuart Hall

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.
- Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611)

"The English language has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of paracolonialism has been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for many tribal people. English, a language of paradoxes, learned under duress by tribal people at mission and federal schools, was one of the languages that carried the vision and shadows of the Ghost Dance, the religion of renewal, from tribe to tribe on the vast plains at the end of the nineteenth century."
- Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance