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FRENCH
443 Flexible
course limited only by the concentration of its material in French; may be
activated by student request or faculty proposal. May be repeated as topics vary to a maximum of four units.
One unit. W
3:00-4:50 PM 1024 Foreign Languages Building Topic: Strategies of Identity In Postcolonial Caribbean
Literature This
course examines the various literary strategies through which the complexities
of self-definition in the post/colonial Francophone Caribbean are articulated,
and the ways in which an identity-structure that reflects the creative
ambiguities of overseas departmentalization can be constructed.
Although legally as much a part of France as the Cantal or the Puy de
D6me, the historical and linguistic specificity that separates these DOMs from
the metropole, as well as their intrinsic ethnic and cultural pluralism,
initiate an exciting framework of difference and discursive innovation that
turns increasingly upon symbolic inscriptions of creolization. Reading these pluralisms of the French
Caribbean community as enabling cultural change, textual selections will seek to
assess the role of such movements as negritude,
antillanite and creolite
in the literary trajectory from the binarisms of the colonial encounter to
the discursive modernities of the post/colonial departement
d’outremer. The social and textual inscription of the Caribbean woman's
double colonization will be given special attention in our readings, as well as
specific strategies of discursive liberation engaged by women writers of the
region. The importance of
strategies of hybridity and metissage to the identitarian patterns traced
by these narratives ultimately constructs a
complex form of self-definition that subverts metropolitan hierarchies
even as it reinscribes the pluralities grounding the regional production of
difference. One
unit.
Professor Adlai Murdoch |