230561 Interamerican Entanglements: Cultural Practices of Resistance in/from the Caribbean (S) (SoSe 2024)

The Caribbean is often treated as a peripheral region, even though it has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance. Caribbean diasporas in the US, throughout the Americas and in Europe have been contributing to innovative cultural practices and theorizations. This seminar explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality. It seeks to widen the scope of research on the Caribbean by focusing on its transatlantic interrelations with North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Exploring a broad variety of experiences inducing (often enforced) migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. We will thus approach the Caribbean as a space of entanglements and of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the Caribbean, Caribbeanness and Caribbean diasporas with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, enslavement, inequality, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation. Based on critical approaches such as postcolonial and decolonial, critical race and intersectional gender perspectives from cultural and literary studies and the social sciences, the seminar investigates the exchanges of people, practices and ideas that have been shaping the Caribbean since European colonization and have marked the region's political, economic and cultural spheres. We will discuss issues such creolization, transculturation, border crossings, migrations and diasporas in the areas of popular culture, poetics and aesthetics (music, dance, literature, performance) memory culture, as well as theoretical innovations such as Creolité or Decolonial Aesthetics. It also asks what we can learn from the Caribbean long experience of living and dealing with diversity.