Caribbean Revolutions and Their Afterlives

Description: The vision for this course is to introduce students to narratives (across multiple genres) about Cuba and Haiti that will encourage them to think about the ways these two (post-)revolutionary Caribbean nations circulate in contemporary imaginaries in the Caribbean and the USA. As the sample texts below suggest, Cuba and Haiti have long served as both inspirational and cautionary tales in the realm of politics, and sites of/fodder for fears and fantasies in pop-culture constructions of racialized, sexualized Caribbean “others”. These (mis-) representations of the historical and contemporary conditions experienced, and intervened in, by Haitian and Cuban people have had long lives and been broadly consumed. They therefore complicate – even impede –our understandings of Cuban and Haitian literary and cultural texts, and also of contemporary realities such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the death of Fidel Castro, the (relative, and perhaps temporary) normalizing of US-Cuban relations, and the Haitians currently seeking refugee status in the US and Canada. This course aims to facilitate students’ engaging anew with what they know, and think they know, about Cuba and Haiti, through careful examination of the aesthetic and rhetorical choices made in texts from and about those nations.

Possible texts: *Some* of the below, to be supplemented with contextual & critical secondary readings, and selections from contemporary media reports:

Cuba

1. Alea, Memorias del Subdesarrollo [film, 1968]
2. extracts from Fidel Castro’s speeches & interviews
3. Reinaldo de Arenas, Before Night Falls, 1992
4. Mayra Montero, Dancing to Almendra, 2005
5. extracts from Peter Moruzzi, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground, 2008
6. Achy Obejas, Ruins, 2009
7. Brugués, Juan de los Muertos [film, 2011]

Haiti

1. extract from CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 1938
2. Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew, 1941
3. Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie [film, 1943]
4. Lydia Bailey (either Kenneth Roberts’ 1947 novel or Jean Negulesco’s 1952 film)
5. Alejo Carpentier, Kingdom of this World, 1949
6. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Dance on the Volcano (1957)
7. Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising, 1995
8. extracts from Gina Athena Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, 2015