(Cross listed with Black Studies 4705/7705)

This course explores the connections between the Caribbean and the broader Atlantic   world through the study of the sugar plantation and “the culture that sugar created” (Miguel Barnet). After European colonization, the Caribbean served as a theater where mercantilist theories were tested with the rise of the sugar plantation and the triangular trade it generated.  The course introduces the historical context that linked the Caribbean to a broader Atlantic world: the forced uprooting of African slaves, enslaved labor in the plantation, the exportation of raw and processed goods to Europe (sugar, rum, coffee, and tobacco) and the importation of basic and luxury goods back to the islands.  These socioeconomic forces converged on the sugar plantation, making it the motor that drove the Caribbean as a sociocultural area.

The injustices of the plantation system generated a vibrant literary response on both sides of the Atlantic. The course centers on early abolitionist or anti-slavery narrative, mainly written by women in France, Spain, and the Americas, and twentieth-century works that revisit the sugar plantation from a critical angle. Read comparatively, Spanish and French texts link abolitionist with anti-patriarchal rhetoric by means of interracial romance and the novel of sentiment. Moving into the twentieth-century, Afro-Atlantic narrative takes a new turn as Caribbean novelists revisit the past through the liberating figure of the maroon slave.  Contemporary fiction, films, and visual art from Cuba, Martinique, and Haiti reimagine the daily life of the plantation to show its lingering effects in present-day Caribbean.  SLLC students are encouraged to read novels in the original Spanish or French. Taught in English.

List of readings:

XIXth century:

Claire de Duras. Ourika (1823); Ourika, an English translation. Trans. John Fowles. (1995)

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab (1841).

Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (1830).

XXth century:

Antonio Benítez Rojo, Paso de los Vientos/A View From the Mangrove (1998). El mar de las

 lentejas/The Repeating Island (1989; 1992).

Patrick Chamoiseau, L'Esclave vieil homme et le Molosse/Slave Old Man (1997).

Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave /Biografía de un cimarrón (1966).

Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley/ La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950).

Edwidge Dandicat, The Farming of Bones (1989).

Films:

La última cena/The Last Supper (1976) Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba).

Sugar Cane Alley—La Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) Euzhan Palcy (Martinique)