ENGL 714-10: Poetry & Poetics: African Diaspora

Section Description:

This course focuses on the poetry and poetics of the African Diaspora with special emphasis on writing from the Caribbean, Canada, and Great Britain. We will be broadly concerned with the meaning for this poetry of the Atlantic slave trade, the plantation system, and colonialism; and more specifically with various problems pertaining to language, culture, tradition, race, and gender as articulated by the poets themselves and in recent literary criticism and cultural theory. Poets to be considered include Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett, M. Nourbese Philip, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, and others. Readings in social and cultural theory will draw from the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, and Edouard Glissant to provide a context and point of reference for our study the diasporic imaginary after 1960.