Fall 2024 Spanish GR6023 section 001

Prisoners Bodies: The (Un)Making of C

(Un)Making Caribbean Subj

Call Number 17499
Day & Time
Location
M 1:00pm-3:00pm
505 Casa Hispánica
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Jacqueline Garcia Suarez
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This course focuses on historical documents, literary works, visual productions, and artwork born out of the experience of confinement across different regions of the Caribbean and its diaspora from the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.

Web Site Vergil
Department Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Enrollment 9 students (15 max) as of 11:52PM Thursday, December 5, 2024
Subject Spanish
Number GR6023
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Section key 20243SPAN6023G001