ENGL 12025 - LLC: Looking Behind Paradise

Course Credit: 1
The Caribbean is commonly viewed as a tourist’s paradise, where the sun, ocean, and rum meet under a perfect sky. As a paradise, it is seen as static, exotic, eternal, yet also a site of temporary escape. This perspective, however, obscures the historical legacies of the region, which include colonialism, plantation economies, slavery, and forced migration. More recently, the region has been defined by political instability, economic underdevelopment, and neocolonialism. Of course, similar blinds are in place in regards to other cultures, exoticizing rather than illuminating the complicated histories of these places. How, then, do Caribbean writers and other writers make sense of these histories, especially when they leave a place imagined by outsiders as heaven on earth? In this course, we will read works by authors, seemingly from paradise, who grapple with and connect the past, the present, the personal, and the political. Using their writings, we will interrogate what it means to be a migratory subject who is anchored in these histories, but who also moves beyond “paradise.” English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]