Shifting Currents: Fluidity, Movement, and Transcultural Intersections in Hispanic Caribbean Literature
Span 535 Section G
Fall 2015
Professor Dara E. Goldman
For centuries, the Caribbean has been a place of encounters, intersections, movements and shifts. From its geography to its (trans)cultural influences, it is a region often closely identified with persistent change.
In this class, we will interrogate definitions of “caribeñidad” and carefully examine how, when, and why those definitions have shifted notably. We will begin with a series of texts that set out to define or describe “Caribbeanness” and then proceed through a series of characteristics or issues that seemingly complicate such definitions/descriptions (i.e. race and racialization, urbanization, migration, queer sexuality). Primary readings will be drawn principally from the Spanish-speaking Antilles—Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico—but we will also discuss works from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean.