The St Lucia-born Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott describes the United States as an 'aggressive democracy' and a 'dictatorship of mediocrity' where 'all are forced to be equal.' One of the characters of Haitian origin featured in the work of the African-Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat describes the experience of finally obtaining a passport and North American citizenship as 'standing in a firing line and finally getting a bulletproof vest'. On the other hand, in political science and international relations the Caribbean is often referred to as 'America's backyard' a disparaging definition which arrogantly conflates the United States with the entire continent and also implies that the United States 'owns' the Caribbean. "There is a continent outside my window" is a quotation from the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's The Prodigal. In this collection, Walcott analyses his relationship with the United States where, at the time of writing, he lived and worked for part of the year. His words highlights that it is becoming increasingly urgent to look at the literature form the United States in relation to the rest of the Americas, particularly because many of the best writers who currently live and/or publish in the United States originate from the Caribbean.
This module aims at looking at the ways in which writers from the United States imagine and represent the Caribbean and how writers from the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora imagine and represent the United States. Students will be able to deepen their knowledge of American literature by becoming acquainted with major poetic, fictional, non-fictional and dramatic works which will be put in dialogue with one another in order to delineate the broader context in which these texts can be better understood. A close reading of primary texts will be at the centre of our method as we will investigate crucial issues such as the difference between reality and the 'American Dream', what it means to be from the Americas, nationalism and transnationalism, the function of memory and imagination, migration and the formation of identity, the diasporic nature of blackness in the United States, the ways in which authors, characters, and texts resist and respond to violence and discrimination, the question of language.
Module Content Note: texts under discussion may contain references to: abuse and physical violence; disordered eating, self-harm and suicide; homophobia; miscarriage/abortion/death and/or abandonment of children; poor mental health; racism and xenophobia; rape and/or sexual assault; slavery and colonialism. Please contact the module supervisor if you have any questions.