SPAN 597 01 Structures of Feeling and Political Imaginations in the Caribbean

Focusing on the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their diasporas’ literary, artistic, and cultural materials, this seminar will study philosophical ideas about feeling, emotion, and affect, among other concepts related to the motion of the human body towards or against other (non) human bodies. The main question that will guide class examinations is: How does the (con)motion of bodies contribute to systemic creation and representation of identities? The seminar will also consider historical and sociocultural contexts, not only to frame an analysis of the materials under study, but also to understand how body (con)motions create different degrees of visibility for the variety of representations seeking to define who is in and who is out of a community. Since the Caribbean has been a zone of multiple confluences, an important goal of the seminar will be to bring a horizontal dialogue between the "Global North" and "Global South” knowledges and art forms. Thinking and feeling through political imaginations of the Caribbean will lead us into comparative discussions with other geographies that also serve as vortices of human relations.