The Cathedral of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic was built during the first half of the sixteenth century. This was the epicenter of the ongoing campaign of terror and human devastation unleashed in the process of Christianization of the New World.
The Program
Course Descriptions
Studying abroad in both Cuba and Mexico for two semesters was an experience that changed my personal and professional life forever. I am currently working as a Program Associate for a national non-profit organization that helps low-income families and communities move towards economic prosperity. I manage and implement financial education programs/services within our asset-building initiatives division. Additionally, I am an adjunct professor of history at Boricua College, and an award-winning documentarian.
Clorinda Andrade '05
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500 Level Courses
CRC 500 - Cultural Analysis (Procesos histórico-culturales del Caribe)
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 course has an important component of archival research and paleographic work.
CRC 501 - Caribbean Thought (Pensamiento Cultural Caribeño)
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 580 - Caribbean Women Writers
This course focuses on some of the most fundamental texts produced by Caribbean women writers 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.
AAS 540 - African Diaspora
The course examines the many-sided procecsses and results of African social and cultural adaptations to Western Hemishphere conditions in the Americas and in the Caribbean. the course introduces these discussions with analyses of African societies 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 to 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 andin secular Western scholarship. the courese will also assess the social, political, economic, and psychoilogical impact of the slave trade on Africa and the slave nations of the Western hemishpere, including the Caribbean.
HIS 506 - North and South Atlantic Core Seminar
This course will introduce students to the historiography of the rapidly growing field of the Atlantic World. The term "Atlantic World" is often applied to the North Atlantic in the early modern period. This course will engage with the material while also expanding the concept to include the South Atlantic and the post-colonial era. As such, it will reach beyond traditional colonial, imperial, and national narratives to examine the interactions of peoples, places, ideas, and events in Europe, Africa, and the Americas intertwined by their connections across and around the Atlantic. Students will gain an understanding of how the field has been defined, how the field has changed over time, and how the field might evolve in the future.
LIN 595 - Sociolinguistics / Caribbean Language Seminar
The study of language structure and its development in the 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.
NOTE: This course may be substituted by a seminar on Caribbean literature and philosophy focusing in one or more of the linguistic traditions of the area to be offered in a variety of departments at UB.
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.
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.
700 Level Courses
CRC 701 - Masters Project Guidance
Relevant Courses in Other Departments
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 - 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 - 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 - The Black Atlantic
Special Topics course
This course focuses on the connections
between contemporary Caribbean, Afro-American, and black British literature.
Other Relevant Courses
LLS 305 - Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Religions
Graduate equivalency awarded.
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.
LLS 308 - Black Presence in Latin America
Graduate equivalency awarded.
This course examines the Afro-Latin and Latino experiences in Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. Its primary purpose is to understand the Afro-Latino experience, but especially how the legacy of colonialism has shaped current conditions and experiences in multi racial societies.