Hybridity, Creoleness, Coolitude

Catalog description

This course is a broad survey of the theoretical and aesthetic movements that have attempted to grapple with trans-cultural or multicultural contexts, in contact zones produced historically by colonialism, slavery, and indenture labor, and more recently by migration. The seminar will ask the following questions: How did theories of hybridity emerge in the colonial context, and how did they evolve in their postcolonial enunciation? How did Caribbean and Indian Ocean intellectual traditions negotiate their own multi-racial identities through, respectively, Creoleness and Coolitude? How do more recent forms of trans-cultural identity, like Afropolitanism, renegotiate between multiple identities? Includes woks by Senghor, Cesaire, Chamoiseau, Glissant, etc.