123225 SE Literature Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English & American / North American (2018S)

This course analyzes the importance of gender in Caribbean women’s postcolonial historical fiction. Disclosed through female genealogies, voices, and figures, the Caribbean woman’s novel challenges historical erasures, silences, violence, racialized oppression, and political exclusions both in the past and in the present. As it is women writers who are primarily taking on the burden of rewriting the past, we begin by reading Andrea Levy’s neo-slave novel The Long Song and Jamaica Kincaid’s work Annie John. Continuing to acknowledge and to analyze important works which contribute to this renaissance in Caribbean women’s historical fiction, we will study Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon. We will read these novels comparatively and will take into account diverse socio-historical contexts.

Course Goals:
This course is designed to introduce students to the different ways women writers in the Caribbean have used the historical novel form. Studying this genre will allow students to concentrate on the representation of gender within different regions of the Caribbean, on diverse aesthetic choices and narrative styles, and on four distinct historical periods: slavery, colonialism, revolution, and the recent past. In doing so, this course creates a politicized counter-narrative to patriarchal history, historiography, and the genre of historical fiction. Additionally, students will become familiar with important theoretical works such as Caroline Rody’s The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History (2000) in order to better ground their understanding of postcolonial feminist politics, literatures, and frameworks. Finally, students will be encouraged toenvision and engage with the social justice and social change these writers are seeking.

Teaching Methods:
Teaching will be based on a mix of formal lectures, guided class discussions based on specific topics, screenings and small group work/discussion.