Caribbean Decolonial Ways

This course examines Caribbean decolonial praxis as a multimodal phenomenon in which the historical, political, cultural, religious, environmental, and affective dimensions of decoloniality coalesce. By drawing on Édouard Glissant’s idea of relationality as the seminar’s structural principle, we will dig into the commonalities and specificities of the colonial experience across the Hispanic, French, and Anglophone Caribbeans. Rather than focusing on the genealogy of decoloniality as traced in the Caribbean philosophical canon, we will complicate, and ultimately unravel, such genealogy through a multifaceted, intersectional lens allowing for the study of foundational texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, and Édouard Glissant, among others, alongside an array of works by female and queer intellectuals, writers, and artists from the 18th century to the present, such as the sisters Paulette and Jane Nardal, Suzanne Césaire, Aida Cartagena, Lorgia García-Peña, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Carlos Martiel, and Kevin Quiles Bonilla. Our discussions will follow two major thematic lines, the (re-) placement and the (dis-) embodiment of coloniality within Caribbean political—and poetic—imagination, and will ultimately assess whether a decolonial project can be human-decentered.

Since a critical premise of the seminar is the belief in decoloniality as a creative, pragmatic principle, we will also host a workshop on decolonial research and creative resistances, which should contribute to students conceiving a decolonial project of their own.