230490 Transnational Entanglements in the Caribbean: Colonial Legacies, Persistent Inequalities (S) (SoSe 2020)

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. 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. Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, 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 opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, 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, south-south relations and diasporas in the areas of popular culture (music, dance), literature, memory culture, as well as national and transnational social and political movements. It also asks what we can learn from the Caribbean long experience of living and dealing with diversity. In study groups, students will prepare one topic of their interest and present it in a suitable format (to be discussed in class).