The skyscape over Havana's Parque Central, showing a tower of the Opera House and the dome of the old Capitol building.
The Program
Course Descriptions
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500 Level Courses
CRC 500 - Cultural Analysis
This course deals with the principal processes of cultural formation based on a historical analysis that revolves around the study of primary sources, dating back to the 16th century, the analysis of fundamental literary, artistic and architectural works, as well as literary and philosophical works of Caribbean thought.
CRC 501 - Caribbean Thought
This is a course on the history of ideas in the Caribbean: 19th century anti-colonial political thought, cultural self-recognition, de-colonization and cultural identity, mestizaje, Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and the most recent post-colonial and critical thinking on the Caribbean by Caribbean intellectuals.
CRC 504 - Caribbean Literature
This course is a survey of Caribbean literature and literary criticism across geographic and linguistic divides, studying the most important texts, from the foundational tradition in the 16th century and the origins of Modernity in the West Indies to the narratives and discoursive practices that inform the present day Caribbean world and its diaspora.
CRC 515 - Caribbean Arts
This course studies artistic form
and processes in the Caribbean from a historical perspective ranging from its
earliest stages to the present. The course has an anthropological focus and
it follows the comparative method in search of a discourse of intercultural
aesthetics.
CRC 517 - Music in the Caribbean
This course is intended to present
a survey of Cuban musical genres and their influence in the music of the Caribbean,
propitiating a critical rapprochement between the different, varied and yet
interrelated musical forms and traditions of the region.
CRC 575 - Linguistic Identity
This course looks at the history of
Spanish in the Caribbean from a socio-linguistic perspective, promoting a more
complex understanding of the Caribbean in a hemispheric context. It looks at
the process of acclimatization and normalization of the Spanish language in
the West Indies and explores those aspects of cultural and scientific discourse
that could be said to respond to a certain pan-Caribbean linguistic consciousness.
CRC 578 - Haitian Language in Cuba
This course is intended to provide
students with a wide panorama regarding the bicentennial presence of Haitian
Creole in the Cuban territory as an example of similar phenomena in other areas
of the Caribbean which are constitutive moments in the creation of national
and trans-national cultures in the region.
CRC 580 - Caribbean Women Writers
This course focuses on some of the
most fundamental texts produced by Caribbean women writhers by selecting a group
of representative novels and submitting them to scrutiny under a broad array
of critical practices, primarily feminist theory with theoretical ties to other
textual theories (post-structuralism and deconstruction), as well as emphasis
given to other literary disciplines (cultural and postcolonial studies).
CRC 594 - Afro-Caribbean Studies
This course offers a comprehensive survey of Cuban religious practices and traditions that are fundamentally African in origins. The course traces the development of these religions as they evolved and survived the Plantation right up to their present strength and vigor in early 21st century Cuba.
CRC 596 - Contemporary Art
This course focuses on the study of
the artistic production of the contemporary Caribbean by analyzing some of the
most relevant problems of this art, both as a critical process and as he continuity
of a process of cultural expression and national identity which has contributed
to the distinctive evolution of Caribbean art in the 20th century and beyond.
600 Level Courses
CRC 601 - Cuban Film and Insularity
This course presents a broad panorama
of Caribbean history and couture from accomplished works of Cuban cinematography,
critically approaching Caribbean culture and history through cinematographic
reconstruction, and looking at Cuban cinema itself as an expression of art and
culture of the Caribbean.
CRC 608 - Contemporary Sculpture
This course looks at the development
of sculpture throughout the 20th century in the islands of the Hispanic Caribbean
(Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) by studying the most relevant
moments and figures, assessing the place this movement occupies both in a regional
as well as international context, and analyzing the principal problems that
act upon it.
CRC 610 - Continental Caribbean Art
This course looks at the arts of the
Continental Caribbean coastal zones of Mexico, Central America, Columbia and
Venezuela. It analyzes the relation between region and nation and its expression
in the symbolic repertoires looking at the multiple identities and cultural
enclaves of those zones within a Caribbean and continental Latin American context.
CRC 619 - Black Theme in Literature
This is a survey course on the most
fundamental writings in Caribbean literature from the 18th century to the present
focusing on the question of race, color and the image of the Black. The course
covers a wide variety of texts (autobiographic narratives, poetry, narrative
and theory) in their original languages spanning a wide spectrum of the insular,
continental and diasporic Caribbean world.
CRC 645 - Caribbean Theatre
This course studies artistic form and processes in the Caribbean from a historical perspective, ranging from its earliest stages to the present. The course has an anthropological focus and it follows the comparative method in search of a discourse of intercultural aesthetics.
CRC 649 - Caribbean Aesthetics
This is a course on the history of ideas in the Caribbean which will venture into the discussion of the complex and at times “unorthodox” aesthetic values that affect all movement in that space of convergences and dystopia of Atlantic America.
CRC 675 - Emigre Literature
This course is a survey of the literature
produced by Caribbean emigrants/exiles paying particular attention to a handful
of momentous works that speak of the diasporic experience of Caribbean peoples
in North America, Europe and Africa.
CRC 686 - Continental Narrative
This course is intended to give students
a comprehensive notion of the identity problems of the continental Caribbean
through narrative, taking into consideration its ideo-aesthetic problematic
and its interactions with the insular Caribbean world.
CRC 689 - Guillen, a Cuban Poet
This course takes a detailed look
at the life, thought and work of Cuban poet and philosopher Nicolas Guillen,
exploring his notion of mestizaje and his relationship to other discourses of
identity, literary traditions and authors in the area.
CRC 690 - Carpentier's Poetry
This course proposes the reconstruction of Carpentier’s imaginary through the analysis of some of his fundamental works, and by looking at the process through which the narrative medium suggested images and forms that in cases preceded a clear social conscience concerning the complicated, multi-lingual and multi-cultural world of the islands.
700 Level Courses
CRC 701 - Masters Project Guidance
Other Departments
AAS 540 - African Diaspora
The course examines the many-sided processes and results of African social and cultural adaptations to Western Hemisphere conditions in the Americas and in the Caribbean. The course introduces these discussions iwth analyses of African societieis and also an analysis of the slave trades as cultural, economic, and political phenomena.
AAS 572 - Africa and the Slave Trade
This course is designed ot examine the history of the international slave trade from Africa by Arab traders (c. 950 - 1850) and European nations and merchants (1450 - 1850). It will search for the international origins of the African slave trade from the larger historical context of the changes in the Old and New Worlds, including the strengthening of Western Europe and of Tsarist Russia and the relative weaknesses of Africa.. It will evaluate the ideological and intellectual justification of the slave trade in Islam, Christianity and in secular Western scholarship. The course will also assess the social, political, economic, and psychological impact of the slave trade on Africa and the slave nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the Caribbean.
COL 706 - Calypso Theory
This course introduces some of the discourses and debates that constitute postcolonial theory. It also aims to give the phenomenon of postcoloniality some historical as well as geopolitical specificity by examining the works of several key figures from the Caribbean who have made postcolonial discourse possible.
ENG XXX - Migrant Literature
Special Topics course
This course focuses on postcolonial narratives that embody a condition of migrancy, hybridity, and cosmopolitan rootlessness rather than an identification with a nationalist cause.
ENG XXX - Resistance Theories: From Negritude to Creolization
Special Topics course
This course focuses on the theories of black resistance that emerged in the Caribbean in the twentieth century and hat have affected black cultural and social life across the world.
ENG XXX - The Black Atlantic
Special Topics course
This course focuses on the connections
between contemporary Caribbean, Afro-American, and black British literature.
LLS 305 - Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Religions
Graduate equivalency awarded.
Contemproary Afro-caribbean Religions
is a multidisciplinary course drawing on the social sciences and humanities
within a post-modern framework. The purpose of this course is to examine the
syncratic religions of the Caribbean and Latin America. This course will focus
primarily on the ontology and practice of Vaudou in Haiti and Santeria in Cuba.
In addition, we will review a number of similar Latino/Caribbean religions and
compare them to Vaudou and Santeria. By doing so, students will have an in-depth
understanding of all traditional religions and their societies, rather than
an overview of many.
This course will also examine traditional socieities versus contemporary modern
and technologically advanced societies to understand the philosophical and social
underpinnings of both, and the extent to which social values contribute to a
culture, functioning for or against its participants.
Course objectives also include students to ahve a hands on experience with ethnographic
data collection, and an understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of Anthropological
field work.
LLS 308 - Black Presence in Latin America
Graduate equivalency awarded.
Black Presence in Latin America is
a revised multi-disciplinary course which examines the Afro-Latin and Latino
experiences in Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. This course
draws on theorieis from History, Sociology, Fine Arts and Anthropology. Its
primary purpose is to understand the Afro-Latino experience, but especially
how the lagacy of colonialism has shaped current conditions and experiences
in multi racial societies. How does this legacy continue to effect Latin American
and Caribbean society today?
The literature and lectures will focus on contemproary and traditional theories
to examine social and cultural change. The course will provice a basic integrated
approach and framework for students to understand their individual experiences
in heterogeneous societies and provide several models for original qualitative
research if students are interested inpursuing their own research for the final
paper.
LIN 505 - Bilingualism and Language Contact
The study of language contact in the
individual and in the community. Linguistic psychological and socio-cultural
implications; educational applications.
Course Content
Linguistic aspects: The grammar of bilinguals; interference vs. fusion; one
or two systems? Linguistic borrowing; communicative competence and repertoires;
linguistic varieties; language/dialect/creole/pidgin/ethnolect.
Social psychological aspects: Development of bilingualism and diglossia; first
and second language acquisition; pidginization and creolization of languages;
bilingual individuals and communities; typologies of bilingualism; dominance
configurations; code switching and mixing; multilingual profiles; language attitude
studies.
Sociological aspects: Language contact situations, diglossia; prestige differentials
among language varieties; social functions and correlates of language; language
socialization, urbanization and standardization; survey research methods; community
profiles; ethno-linguistic minorities; sociolinguistic diagnostics.
Pedagogical aspects: Bilingual education; bilingual schools and programs, TESOL;
contrastive and error analysis.
Language planning and language policy: Standardization and officialization of
(minority) languages; administrative and educational language policy.
LIN 595 - Sociolinguistics
The study of language sturcture and its development int he social context of speech communities in the U.S. and the Caribbean; interactions between social factors and languages, pidgins, creoles or dialects. The process of linguistic change; pidginization and creolization; rules of linguistic performance; linguistic behavior as an index of social status; analysis of problems of language and dialect minorities.
SPA 506 - Dialectología del Caribe Hispánico
Este curso enfoca la variación lectal en el Caribe hispánico desde una perspectiva que combina las direcciones estructuralistas, generativistas y variacionistas.
SPA 555 - Fonología Dialectal del Caribe Hispánico
Este curso enfoca la variación fonológica en el Caribe hispánico con especial attención al consonantismo posnuclear. Se contrastan los análisis descriptivos, generativistas y variacionistas y se examinan en particular las implicaciones de la variación caribeña para modelos teróricos en conflicto, como lo son la fonología reglar y la fonología restriccional.