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Offered: Spring

Course Description: What are the transmaritime pathways that link the islands and inhabitants of the Caribbean?  This course explores representations of love, migration, and mystery in Francophone Caribbean works of the 19th and 20th centuries.  The course will provide literary and historical overviews of migration in both the Caribbean region and the larger African diaspora.  In our analyses of these archipelagic “routes and roots,” students will encounter uncanny tales of love that extend across cultures, languages, generations, and environments.  We will discuss the ways in which these expressions of love forge a Franco-Caribbean Romanticism that complicates and repositions the Romantic movement of 19th-century Europe.  Through readings of selected plays, poems, and novels, students will discover how the emergence of uncanny figures, spaces, and paroles challenges traditional love scenes and neocolonial systems. Students will also be introduced to the theoretical concepts of tidalectics, créolité and antillanité through the examination of works from Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and New Orleans. Topics of discussion will include eros, ecology, gender, displacement, religion, uncanny existences, and the supernatural.