Often graduate courses have pre-requisites and other program restrictions. Check with the graduate director or the instructor for further information and requests for exceptions.
Spring 2025
16:940:660 Graduate Seminar: Performing the Caribbean: Imagining Otherwise the Coloniality of Catastrophe
2:00-5:00 Thursday * AB5190 CAC
Professor Camilla Stevens
Theatrical performance, an embodied site of collective remembrance where futures can be imagined, constitutes a powerful critical and creative intervention in the discourses of catastrophe and colonialism in the Caribbean. Natural disasters, political upheaval, armed conflict, economic hardship, migrant crises, gender violence, and public health emergencies have had catastrophic effects on Caribbean societies. While these events are often framed as discrete ruptures, catastrophes have a past, present, and future; they are embedded in history, in Europe’s first contact with the Americas, and have long-term consequences. Decolonial philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres notes that in the Caribbean, coloniality can be understood as “metaphysical, demographic, and environmental catastrophe, that is, as a major ‘downturn’ in the definition of peoples, the environment, and the very basic coordinates of what constitutes a human world.”1 In this seminar, some of the questions we will ponder include:
How and why does the Caribbean (and its diasporas) offer particularly rich sites to unpack the multiple threads of coloniality?
-
Why are theater and performance powerful forms to engage with the coloniality of catastrophe? How do theater and performance specifically bring public and political consciousness to catastrophe? How can they contribute to “counter catastrophic” thought and lay bare the coloniality of disaster?
-
How do performances about catastrophe imagine modes of survival or conceptions of world building that represent an alternative means of engaging with coloniality? In what ways do these understandings of catastrophe and coloniality intersect with inquiries posed by disaster studies, human rights studies, post-colonial and decolonial studies, trauma studies, memory studies, and the environmental humanities, for example?
This course is taught in English, but student projects on texts in their original languages are welcome and depending on the student cohort our discussion can be multilingual. We will draw from Theater and Performance Studies, Post-Colonial and Decolonial Studies, and Black Studies to frame our readings/viewings of pieces by authors such as Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace, Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Ina Césaire, Trevor Rhone, René Marqués, José Triana, Nilo Cruz, Carmelita Tropicana, and Josefina Báez.
[1] “Afterward: Critique and Decoloniality in the Face of Crisis, Disaster and Catastrophe” in The Aftershocks of Disaster, eds. Bonilla and LeBrón, 338.
Camden History Department
Graduate seminar: Race & Ethnicity in the Americas
56:512:524:40
Thursday 6-8:50p
Prof. Lorrin Thomas