This course examines the Anglophone Caribbean space as a zone of cultural contact—of voluntary and involuntary, of real and imagined interaction between people(s). We are going to look at interactions and encounters from a historical perspective, starting with Western Cultures’ colonial invasions and ending with 21st century diaspora cultures. The focus will be primarily on cultural encounters between colonizers and colonized with special emphasis on a Caribbean perspective. We shall study autobiographical accounts, media reports, novels, poems, music and film. In the end, we are primarily concerned with how people perceive themselves and others as “other” and how this finds expression in factual and fictional accounts. We are going to explore the Caribbean in the wider sense, including the diaspora, as a space of encounters that vary in range and degree; and we shall try to find a language and categories for describing and understanding such encounters and the cultural work they do. It will also emerge how such real and imagined cultural encounters are determined by and in turn determine world views, ideas of race and ethnicity, nationalism, xenophobia, and immigration politics.
- Lehrende:r: Julia Nitz