LT 946 - SEA OF LENTILS: MODERNITY, LITERATURE AND FILM IN THE
CARIBBEAN - COURSE OUTLINE 2010-11
Maria Cristina Fumagalli
WEEK 2 – Introduction
Thomas, Clive The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean (Latin America
Bureau, 1988), pp. 12-43
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays trans by M. Dash (Charlottesville: Virginia U.P.,
1989), pp. 137-139.
Balutansky, Kathleen and Sourieau, Marie-Agnes (eds), Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural
Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity (Florida U.P. / West Indies U.P., 1998), pp. 1-8.
Berman, Marshall All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (Verso, 1982), pp. 15-17
Sybille Fischer, “Chronology” in Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution (Duke U.P. 2004), pp. 283-285.
Mimi Sheller, “Creolization in Discourses of Global Culture,” in Uprooting/Regrounding: Questions of Home
and Migration, ed by Sara Ahmed et al (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 273-289.
WEEK 3 - Modernity and the Caribbean
Jameson, Frederic A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 1-13
Knauft, Bruce Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Indiana U.P. 2002), pp. 1-13
Fischer, Sybille Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Duke U.P.
2004), pp. 1-38
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot”, in Knauft, Bruce
Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Indiana U.P. 2002), pp. 220-237
**** SCREENING: The Last Supper (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)****
WEEK 4 - Antonio Benítez-Rojo Sea of Lentils + The Last Supper (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)
Danticat, Edwidge “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here,” available online:
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/literature/danticat-ugly.htm
Blasini, Gilberto “The Last Supper (1976): Cinema, History, Decolonization,” in Film Analysis: A Norton
Reader, ed. by Jeff Geiger and R.L. Rutsky (New York London: W.W. Norton, 2005), pp. 678-694.
Zemon Davis, Natalie Slaves on Screen (Cambridge, MA: 2000), pp. 55-68.
Beckles, Hilary “Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks,” Journal of Caribbean
History, vol. 22, nos 1-2, 1988, pp.1-19 rpt in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, ed by Verene Shepherd
and Hilary McD Beckles (Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 869-878.
Hegel, G.W., “The Master-Slave Dialectic” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton, 2001),
pp. 630-636.
**** SCREENING: Sugar Cane Alley (dir Euzhan Palcy)****
WEEK 5 – Joseph Zobel Black Shack Alley + Sugar Cane Alley (dir Euzhan Palcy)
Jones, Bridget, “La Rue Cases-Negres (Black Shack Alley): From Novel to Film,” in The Francophone
Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture ed. by Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes
(The University of the West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 102-113.
Beverly Ormerod, An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London Heinemann, 1985), pp. 56-86
Burton, Richard “The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité,
Créolité” in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today (MacMillan), pp.137147.
D’Hulst, Lieven and de Bleeker, Liesbeth, “From ‘Habitation’ to ‘En-Ville’: the play with European models of
space in the French Caribbean Novel (Zobel and Chamoiseau),” European Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (2005), pp.
271-282 (available online through the library database). This article will be very useful to read in relation to
Texaco (weeks 7-8) but you can start looking at it now as it also deals with Black Shack Alley.
WEEK 6 – Edwidge Danticat The Farming of Bones
Wucker, Michele, Why the Cocks Fight; Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispanola (Hill & Wang,
1999), pp. 44-59
Den Tandt Catherine “El Masacre se pasa a pie: Haitian and Dominican Border Talk,” in Marginal Migrations:
The Circulation of Culture Within the Caribbean ed. by Shalinin Puri (MacMillan, 2003), pp. 165-189.
Novak, Amy “'A Marred Testament': Cultural Trauma and Narrative in Danticat's The Farming of Bones,” The
Arizona Quarterly, vol 62 no 4 (Winter 2006), 93-122 (available though the library database).
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983), pp. 5-7; 37-46.
Richard Lee Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican
Republic,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 82/3 (Duke University Press: 2002) (available through
the library database), pp. 589-635.
WEEK 7-8 – Patrick Chamoiseau Texaco
Berman, Marshall All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (Verso, 1982), pp. 148-155 and
164-171
Burton, Richard “The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité,
Créolité” in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today (MacMillan), pp.147166.
Dawson, Ashley, “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City",” Social Text 81, vol 22 no 4
(Winter 2004), pp.17-34 (available online through the library database).
“A Reader in the Room: Rose Myriam Rejouis Meets Patrick Chamoiseau",” Callaloo, vol 22, no 2 (Spring
1999) pp. 346-350 (available online through the library database).
Caldwell Roy Chandler, “For a Theory of the Creole City: Texaco and the Postcolonial Postmodern,” in Ici-Là:
Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French ed. by Mary Gallagher (Rodopi, 2003), pp. 25-40.
McCusker Maeve “No Place Like Home? Constructing an Identity in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco,” in Ici-Là:
Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French ed. by Mary Gallagher (Rodopi, 2003), pp. 41-60.
Walcott, Derek “A Letter to Chamoiseau,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 213232.
D’Hulst, Lieven and de Bleeker, Liesbeth, “From ‘Habitation’ to ‘En-Ville’: the play with European models of
space in the French Caribbean Novel (Zobel and Chamoiseau),” European Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (2005), pp.
271-282 (available online through the library database).
WEEK 9-10 - Derek Walcott Omeros
Derek Walcott, “Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” available online:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html
Derek Walcott on Omeros: an interview with Luigi Sampietro,” Caribana 3 (1992), pp. 31-44 available online:
http://users.unimi.it/caribana/OnOmeros.html.
Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” in What the Twilights Says: Essays (Faber, 1998), pp. 36-64.
Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Florida U.P., 2000), pp. 63-90.
Fumagalli, Maria Cristina and Patrick, Peter, “Two Healing Narratives/; Suffering, Reintegration, and the
Struggle of Language”, Small Axe 20 (2006), pp. 61-79 (available through the library database).
Derek Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry,” in Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs,
vol 16 no 1 (1974), pp. 3-13 (available through the library database).
**** SCREENING: The Agronomist (dir Jonathan Demme)****
**** SCREENING: Suite Habana (dir Fernando Pérez)****
WEEK 11 -The Agronomist (dir Jonathan Demme) + Suite Habana (dir Fernando Pérez)
Teshome, Gabriel “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory ed by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (prentice Hall, 1993), pp.340-358.
Sterne, Jonathan The Audible Past (2003) pp. 6-10.
Pierre, Hyppolite Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes: Haiti the Phoenix (Lanham, University Press of
America, 2006), pp.106-119
There are many websites devoted to these two films (some good some not so good) –do a bit of internet research
before you come to the class.