Over the last several decades, increased critical attention has been paid to questions of space, and it has become an important focus within several academic disciplines. We are now attending to the encounters between different cultures and the repercussions that these have on definitions of space and identity.  More specifically, major metropolitan centers are often studied as sites of development (whether productive, excessive or insufficient), hybridity, transgression and transnationalism.    

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This course seeks to explore visions of the metropole in Caribbean and U.S. Caribbean cultures.  We will analyze the intersections between urban spaces and the formation of local/global subjectivities.  That is, to what extent do real-and-imagined urban spaces constitute a site of containment, possibility, uneven development, hybridity and/or homogenizing hegemony in Caribbean cultural production?  How does desire--understood in terms of sexuality, cosmopolitanism (i.e. desire for the urban), as a mechanism of territorialization and/or the negotiation of power--interact with urban spaces in Caribbean cultures?  What are the spaces of queer Caribbean desire and how are these spaces narrated/represented in contemporary literary and cultural production?