What has it historically meant to speak the French language? Has it been, always and everywhere, a marker of modernity with its emphasis on sophistication, education, eloquence, and rational intelligence? What has it historically meant to identify as “French”? Who gets to be considered “French”? Who doesn’t? And why? How does the nationalist notion of Frenchness interact with race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality?
Both the French language and the French identity have been historically contested terrains of struggle—especially for those stuck in a more liminal space. One may possess not only the capacity to speak the French language, but be internally conflicted in terms of one’s own identification with the French identity and language if only because it frequently reminds them of their own colonized and forgotten language, identity, and ancestral culture. Today, many calls for decolonization ask us to collectively contend with the now multi-generational wake and trauma caused by centuries of French imperial control, invasion, subjugation, and/or enslavement. They also point us to those creole and Afro-diasporic ways of speaking and being in the world which have survived and transformed under many French colonial regimes that sought to suppress, oppress, and even eradicate them. At base, the course seeks to ask the following leading questions: What are the often buried historical connections among the French language, identity, and culture within the specific historical contexts of French imperialism and colonialism in the Caribbean region? What tools may help us dig deeper to unearth them? And, lastly, who can help us remember?
This course offers a deep dive into the French imperial and colonial projects by examining and illuminating the often obscured and entangled, messy and complex relationships among French language, identity, and culture. It juxtaposes together the critically linguistic, philosophical, and theoretical work by major French Caribbean scholars and thinkers alongside key pieces of literary production by major French Caribbean writers. The course focuses on those who share a relationship with the Greater and Lesser Antillean island nations of Haïti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.
The course also challenges and yet facilitates students in undertaking collective and collaborative investigation, discussion, and production. It offers a series of scaffolded assignments that aid students in identifying, developing, and honing their own critical and interdisciplinary skills. These include their abilities to read, write, interpret, translate, know, and think. The course will offer students key concepts, theories, and frameworks developed in the fields of U.S. and Caribbean Cultural Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, as well as Black Caribbean Feminist Theory. Classes will be a mixture of small- and large-group discussions, lectures, group presentations, and embodied activities.