SPAN 597 Caribbean Feminisms in Literature

This course focuses on feminist literary texts, including essays, poetry, narrative, and theater, from the Hispanic, Anglo, and French Caribbean, as well as their diasporas in the United States and Europe. We will begin by defining the Caribbean geographically, historically, and socio-culturally, and will proceed to study how feminism has been thought and practiced in the Caribbean in conversation with the rest of Latin America, the United States, and Europe. We will analyze how the authors address diverse topics, including the roles of (non-) cisgender women in society, the suffragette movement, public health, labor and workers' rights, environmentalism, individual and collective sovereignty, race, gender, and sexuality, migration, and authorship/authority. Some of the questions that will guide our discussions will be: How can we define feminism as a philosophy and a practice in the Caribbean? How do Caribbean feminisms relate to their contextual specificities? For each text, we will also engage with its form and aesthetics and will explain how these aspects build a platform for the literary voice's politics.