Course Description
Why Caribbean studies? Or more specifically, why Caribbean studies in Taiwan? The answers to these questions can be either simple or rather complicated, depending on how one looks at the potentially fraught presuppositions underlying not only the possible answers but also the questions themselves. This seminar proposes to approach Caribbean literatures and cultures in light of a certain “specter of comparisons” (cf. Benedict Anderson) that may prove ineluctable, integral and instrumental to our inquiry into the Caribbean. The comparisons in question can be understood at different levels and in nuanced senses: first, intra-Caribbean comparisons between countries and cultures of different linguistic blocks (eg. Anglophone and Francophone literatures) as well as between those falling under one common category (eg. Afro-Caribbean cultural forms in Cuba vs. those in Jamaica); second, Caribbean-European comparisons between the colonized and the colonizers in the past that have evolved in neocolonial relations and have been further complicated by US influences in the region; finally, the (non-)relations between the Caribbean and Taiwan, with the relevance—whether cultural, historical, epistemological, or political—of the Caribbean to Taiwan remaining largely unexplored.