Comparative Caribbean Modernisms

Scholars have frequently named the Caribbean as the crucible of what we now understand as the modern, such that if one understands modernism, in broad terms, as an aesthetic response to modernity, the Caribbean appears as an especially poignant space in which to examine it. At the same time, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the region, not to mention the sharply divergent historical trajectories with regard to colonialism and political independence, have helped keep scholarly accounts of modernism largely siloed within the disciplinary boundaries of each of the Caribbean's four primary linguistic areas (Dutch, English, French, and Spanish). This seminar therefore hopes to bring together a diverse group of scholars working in anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and/or neerlandophhone Caribbean literatures (as well as literature written in region's the numerous creole languages), in order to tease out both the particularities and the commonalities that might be found 
in the vast and evolving array of autochthonous modes of self-reflexive literary experimentation enacted by the region’s writers. The seminar is happy to consider a broad historical range, from examinations of Caribbean writers active in the founding moments of European-based modernism such as Claude McKay, Jean Rhys or the hispanophone modernismo movement, to treatments of the more contemporary afterlives of contestatory modernist critique advanced by figures such as Astrid Roemer, Bea Vianen, or the authors forming the Martinican Créolité group. The seminar's ultimate aim will be to begin formulating a working sense of the contours of Caribbean modernism, recognizing the localized diversity of modernism’s emergence and adaptation over time and across the culturally distinct spaces of the Caribbean basin without losing sight of the global, often imperially inflected currents that in part helped usher such work into being.