Cuba: Modernity, Subjection, Revolution

Catalog description

This course will explore Cuba's intellectual currents and cultural objects from the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. How did different ideas about modernity, subjection, and revolution emerge and interact with one another in literary texts, visual artifacts, and legal documents throughout Cuban history? How does a conceptual history of these terms look like if we center the island's political, artistic, scientific, and religious movements? How does Cuba and its history inform our own ideas about freedom, slavery, and racial relations? While addressing these questions, we will also reflect on the island's past and present position in relation to other parts of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Atlantic world. Ultimately, this course aims to challenge and historicize the most common connotations attributed to modernity, subjection, and revolution by examining not only European-based philosophical thought, but also cultural objects and discourses produced within the specific contexts of Cuba and the Caribbean. Taught in Spanish.