Migrant Poetics, Narratives of Flight

Catalog description

For the poet Aimé Cesaire, from the tiny island of Martinique, there was the master narrative of the middle passage, that brought African slaves to the Americas; there was the movement of labor and capital that circled the Caribbean in slavery's aftermath; and there was the circulation of ideas that produced the radical collages of surrealism. This course examines a range of narratives of flight - that of the refugee, the immigrant, the exile, the migrant worker - in fiction, poetry, film, theater, painting and music. It also examines critical theories of migration on refugeeism, displacement, and immigration, in order to ask: How does "flight" produce new aesthetic forms? How have scholars theorized the range of concepts and problems engendered by such movement? Along the way, we will read about Iraqi refugees, Vietnamese "boat people", Indian painters, the Jewish dispossessed of World War II. Towards the end of the term, we use this theoretical vocabulary to consider the ocean still to cross (une mer encore à traverser) in relation to two contemporary crises: flight across the Mediterranean and the refugeed Rohingya of Myanmar.