Introductory description

Topics covered will include: plot and plantation, sugar and oil frontiers, the Eco-Gothic, the 'slow violence' of capitalist development.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Introduction: The Caribbean, World-Ecology and World Literature
Martin Carter, "Listening to the Land"
Wilson Harris, "Fences Upon the Earth" (short story)
Elizabeth DeLoughrey et al, Introduction to "Caribbean Literature and the Environment"
Jason W Moore, "Transcending the Metabolioc Rift: A theory of crises in the capitalist world-
ecology" and "Sugar and the expansion of the early world-economy"
Sharea Deckard, "Editorial: Reading the World-Ecology"
Michael Niblett, "World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature"

Week 2: Mapping the World-Ecology
Wilson Harris, "The Whole Armour"
Olive Senior, "Gardening in the Tropics"

Week 3: Plot and Plantation
George Lamming, "In the Castle of my Skin"
Elma Napier, "A Flying Fish Whispered"

Week 4: Caribbean Eco-Gothic
Edgar Mittelholzer, "My Bones and My Flute"
Mayra Montero, "You, Darkness" ["In the Palm of Darkness"]
Film Screening: "I Walked with a Zombie", dir. Jacques Tourneur (1943)

Week 5: "Hotels are squatting on my metaphors": development as tragi-comedy.
Derek Walcott, "Beef, No Chicken"
Kamau Brathwaite, "The Namsetoura Papers"

Week 6: Written on the landscape: buried histories, exhumed bodies
Erna Brodber, "The Rainmaker's Mistake"
Edouard Glissant, "The Overseer's Cabin"

Week 7: Catastrophes, Shocks and Eruptions
Yvonne Weekes, "Volcano: A Memoir"
Pierre Clitandre, "Cathedral of the August Heat"

Week 8: "Oil in the Caribbean Imaginary"
Frank Martinus Arion, "Double Play"
VS Naipaul, "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad"

Week 9: Urban Ecologies: from the "jungle" to the "dungle"
Roger Mais, "The Hills Were Joyful Together
Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, "San Juan: Memoir of a City"

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• - Develop an understanding of the relationship between Caribbean literature and environmental history as well as the critical debates over ecocriticism, postcolonial studies and world literature. - Enhance their understanding of the debates around key issues including world-ecology, commodity frontiers, the legacies of plot and plantation, food regimes and the ‘slow violence’ of capitalist development.- Advance their awareness of the ways in which cultural forms and literary genres register socio-ecological upheavals through analysis of themes such as the Eco-Gothic, the toxification of bodies, and urban ecologies. - Develop a critical methodology for reading texts comparatively in their socio-ecological context.- Develop an essay topic designed to cover an aspect of the module in greater depth, making use of the theoretical frameworks used during the course.

Indicative reading list

Campbell, Chris and Erin Somerville. What is the Earthly Paradise? : Ecocritical Responses to the
Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World. London and New York: Verso, 2001.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth., Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley. Eds. Caribbean
Literature and the Environment. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley. Postcolonial Ecologies. Oxford: OUP, 2011.
Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
——. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1997.
Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason. Routledge, 2000.
Lovelace, Earl. Growing in the Dark: Selected Essays. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San
Juan, Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon, 2003.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New
York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
Moore, Jason W. 2000. ‘Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical
Perspective’ in Organization and Environment 13 (2): 123-57.
Moore, Jason W. 2003a. ‘The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and
the Rise of Capitalism’ in Theory and Society 32: 307-377.
Moore, Jason W. 2003b. ‘Capitalism as World Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental
History’ in Organization and Environment 16 (4): 431-58.
Moore, Jason W. 2010. ‘The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist
World-Ecology, 1450–2010’ in Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389-413.
Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in New Left Review 1 (January–
February): 54–68.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, Postcolonial Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Niblett, Michael. 2011. ‘“When you take thing out the earth and you en’t put nothing back”:
Nature, Form, and the Metabolic Rift in Jan Carew’s Black Midas’ in The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 46.2.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, London: Harvard UP, 2011.
Puri, Shalini. Caribbean Postcolonial (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, Inc.
1974.
David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since
1492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. ‘Petro-magic-realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian
Literature’ in Postcolonial Studies 9 (4): 449-464.
Wynter, Sylvia, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’ in Savacou 5 (June 1971): 95-102.

Subject specific skills

No subject specific skills defined for this module.

Transferable skills

No transferable skills defined for this module.