Caribbean Women Writers

Catalog description

This course offers a Pan-Caribbean study of women's writing, primarily contemporary fiction. Setting the novels in a context that begins in the Middle Passage or comparable forced migration to the Americas, we examine the interconnections between those traumatic experiences and the relations established and demanded by imperialism. Topics for discussion include spaces and languages of resistance; genealogies, family trees, roots; memory and exile; political activism and its consequences; labor and socioeconomics; the role of education in colonialism and in immigrant life; and challenges to conventional categories of identity. Authors may include Marshall, Hopkinson, Kincaid, Condé, Danticat, Santiago, Santos-Febres, Obejas, McWatt, Brand, Collins, Mootoo, Espinet, Lara, and John.