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Course Description

This course will focus on the inter-relation of English canonical texts and Antillean postcolonial works. We will analyze how Antillean authors inscribe a new identity over and against the one imposed by European literary heavyweights through an act of creative reappropriation. We will discover how the Caribbean cultural Diaspora becomes a dynamic site of resistance in our core texts and engage in close readings which focus on the centrality of race and ethnicity, as well as gender, in Caribbean self-definition. Finally, we will query the accepted notion of the “canon” and what it means to re-write a canonical work of literature from a “subaltern” perspective.

Core Texts

• A Tempest. Une Tempête. Aimé Césaire.
• The Tempest. Shakespeare.
• I, Tituba. . . Black Witch of Salem.  Moi, Tituba, sorcière. . . Noire de Salem. Maryse Condé.
• The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• Windward Heights.  La Migration des coeurs. Maryse Condé.
• Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë.
• Sugar Cane Alley. (Film). Joseph Zolbel.
• Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe.
• The “Mulâtresse” Solitude. Simone Schwarz-Bart.
• Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys.
• Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë.

Additional texts

• Course-Pack: Suggested critical readings.
• The Location of Culture. Homi K. Bhabha.