Παρουσίαση/Προβολή

(ENL592) -  Ασημίνα Καραβαντά

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

This course intersects contemporary Caribbean poetics and decolonial thought to examine the Caribbean as a paradigmatic site of “trans-modernity” (Enrique Dussel; Walter Mignolo). The site of slave revolts, revolutions, and maroon communities, the Caribbean archipelagos has given rise to a “poetics of relation” (Édouard Glissant) that rewrites the history of modernity as a history of connections and affiliations between cultures and collectivities whose larger horizon is not Euro-America but rather “planetarity” (Gayatri Spivak).. Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau have recently argued that the Caribbean poetics of creolité, hybridity, and diaspora can serve as an example for a radical imaginary of alterity and relation that can transform our understanding of community, and rights in light of the growing migrations of singularities and collectivities and their persevering claims of their right to soil as well as to human and citizenship rights in the present. Drawing on the Caribbean poetics of hybridity and diaspora, the course will align decolonial thought and deconstruction through a reconstellation of texts that rewrite the past and present histories of dispossession, colonization and migration. Such an alignment has been integral to the critical project of decentering modernity from the heart of European thought developed by thinkers from Latin-America and the Caribbean like Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Sylvia Wynter, among many others. Their task has been to articulate and disseminate the local knowledges and “border gnoseologies” (Mignolo) that have also shaped modernity as a transcultural rather than as a singularly European phenomenon. Contending for a mapping of the human that dethrones man from the peak of the bio-evolutionary pyramid to instead offer a more democratic and pluriversal view of “being human with” other humans and species in the world, decolonial thought has critically engaged western discourses by way of deconstructing the onto-colonial poetics of the Enlightenment. Their works articulate not only a different history of modernity but also generate a decolonial philosophy and poetics of being developed through the crisscrossing, overlapping and growing affiliations between different cultures forced into or thrown into contact throughout “transmodernity” (Mignolo; Dussel), which is determined by the “co-evalness” of cultures (Johannes Fabian) and is contingent upon the reciprocity with the “time of the other” (Fabian). Working through a variety of texts, we will explore the different genres of decolonial subjectivities in the long present by excavating the individual and collective acts of resistance and claims to rights, hospitality, political and social acknowledgement in contemporary narratives of dispossession and “survivance” (Gerald Vizenor) that demonstrate how the “time of the other” (Johannes Fabian) can no longer be forgotten nor omitted as it is embodied by the growing communities of strangers who keep arriving. 

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Τρίτη 1 Μαρτίου 2022