Course info

The St Lucia-born Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott describes the United States as an 'aggressive democracy' and a 'dictatorship of mediocrity' where all are forced to be 'equal'. One of the characters of Haitian origin who features in the work of the African-Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat describes the experience of finally obtaining a passport and North American citizenship as 'standing in a firing line and finally getting a bulletproof vest'. On the other hand, in political science and international relations the Caribbean is often referred to as 'America's backyard' - a disparaging definition which arrogantly conflates the United States with the entire continent and also implies that the United States 'owns' the Caribbean.

This module aims to look at the ways in which writers from the United States imagine and represent the Caribbean and how writers from the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora imagine and represent the United States. Students will be able to deepen their knowledge of American literature by becoming acquainted with major poetic, fictional, nonfictional and dramatic works which will be put in dialogue with one another in order to delineate the broader context in which these texts can be better understood. A close reading of primary texts will be at the centre of our method as we will investigate crucial issues such as the difference between reality and the American Dream, what it means to be from the Americas, nationalism and transnationalism, the function of memory and imagination, migration and the formation of identity, the diasporic nature of blackness in the United States, and the question of language.

"There is a continent outside my window" is a quotation from the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's The Prodigal. In this collection, Walcott analyses his relationship with the United States where, at the time of writing, he lived and worked for part of the year. His words highlight the fact that it is becoming increasingly urgent to look at the literature form the United States in relation to the rest of the Americas, particularly because many of the best writers who currently live and/or publish in the United States originate from his native Caribbean. Walcott himself is a case in point, but other prominent writers include: Dominican-American Junot Diaz, recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2012 MacArthur Fellow; Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, recipient of the 1999 American Book Award, the 2011 Langston Hughes Medal and 2009 MacArthur Fellow; Jamaican-American Claude McKay, posthumous recipient of 1977 Order of Jamaica award.