Prisoners Bodies: The (Un)Making of C

This course focuses on historical documents, literary works, visual productions, and artwork born out of the experience of confinement across different regions of the Caribbean and its diaspora from the 19th century onward. It particularly examines how diverse iterations of the prison—as both a concrete and a fictional space, a trope, and an ideological apparatus—are ingrained in the (un)making of Caribbean “national bodies.” Likewise, the course will explore a varied archive of media and aesthetics revolving around the representation of ‘the body in prison’ in its different constituencies (prisoner, visitor, jailer, tourist, etc.). This will help us understand the prison experience not exclusively as a site of trauma but also as a critical point of encounter between Caribbean intellectual and nationalistic discourses, community-based activism, and ultimately capital. By interrogating the Foucauldian conflation of the penitentiary system and power’s dominant ideology, we examine the paradoxes of Caribbean political imagination as underpinned by the processes of forced labor, corporal discipline and commodification, exile, and resistance. We will pay special attention to questions about the roles of race, gender, and sexuality in Caribbean politics and diasporic communities that emerge at this manifold crossroad.

Students will become familiar with works from the Hispanic, French, and Anglophone Caribbeans and their diasporas, ranging from the memoirs of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture and the archival collection of Puerto Rican activist Lolita Lebrón’s imprisonment to the artwork currently being produced from prison by Cuban Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. Concurrently, we will read critics and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Elaine Scarry, Diana Paton, Frantz Fanon, and Fernando Ortiz, among others. To complement our seminar discussions, the course will also host a series of talks on the works of contemporary Caribbean scholars and artivists.