AFR 133
Plantation and the Plot: the Poetics of Caribbean Economic Thought and Struggle Spring 2022
Division II
Cross-listed GBST 133 / ECON 133
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This introductory course to Caribbean Economic Thought contextualizes the poetics of economic ideas, struggle and knowledge alongside popular literary works connected to Caribbean Economic Development. Using the ‘plantation’ and the ‘plot’ as a site of struggle and continuing exploitation and extraction, this course delves into Caribbean postcolonial development thinking to explore its cultural and historical roots. By examining literary and economic writings of Caribbeanists and Caribbean connected contributors side by side, we seek to uncover these links to how the Caribbean economy and society are framed, conceptualized and traversed as transplanted spaces, economic zones, and transformative perspectives to economic thinking integral to merchant and industrial capitalism and New World social formations. We will examine historical and contemporary texts of contributors to the New World Group that centers the Caribbean within global economic transformations. Some events this course covers are indigenous genocide, commercial slave trading and indenture, structural adjustment and postcolonial debt, technology to the current fragmenting of global neoliberalism. These events will help shape an appreciation for the material and socio-cultural understandings of economic phenomena from the plantation to the sea within cultural and literary works in pluralistic, productive, and powerful ways.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 3902
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Oral or poster presentation analyzing a literary and Caribbean economist's work side-by-side (15 minutes or full-length/ multi-page poster); critical analysis of a Caribbean economic sector or major regional report--choice made after discussion with instructor (10 pages); final project: review of a specific Caribbean community defined by group, geography or economic status drawing upon class, race, gendered axes of analysis (15 pages); participation (creative presentation of a reading drawing upon Caribbean cultures that must raise questions for class discussion)
Prerequisites: None
Enrollment Preferences: Preference also for 1st and 2nd year students. If over-enrolled preference to AFR and Political Economy students.
Distributions: Division II
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
GBST 133 Division II AFR 133 Division II ECON 133 Division II
Attributes: AFR Core Electives

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