ASRC 6308 - Between Body and Mind: Anti-Universalism in Caribbean Postcolonial Thought

(crosslisted) AMST 6308, LATA 6308, ROMS 6308

Spring. 4 credits.

G. Arching.

This seminar examines the relationships between consciousness and the body, as leading thinkers on Caribbean colonial and postcolonial conditions have posited them. Readings will be organized around three specific problems: (1) how secularism was employed in early, Modern Europe to determine the relationship between the native colonial subject’s body, mind, and soul and enslavement; (2) how bodily consciousness and “unconscious” resistance (ranging from armed resistance to sports and dance) have been articulated as tools for struggling against various kinds of oppression; and (3) how anti-universalist claims emerged as political necessity for rectifying the relations between body and mind in the Caribbean’s emancipatory discourses. We will read texts by Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegel, Judith Butler, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, McGary and Lawson, Elaine Scarry, Kamau Brathwaite, Césaire, Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Glissant, Hortense Spillers, Paul Gilroy, and others.