BLST 114. The Other America(s)

In The Repeating Island, Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a vehement dreamer while placing the Black American civil rights activists’ posture in the realm of ‘Caribbean performance.’ King’s capacious vision of world-making is rooted in a nebulous African-diasporic identity encompassing both North American and Caribbean sensibilities. The nexus point of these intertwined geographies symbolize a fecund space of intersections, much like jazz music, representing a fluid, transnational, and creolized identity. Commencing with MLK’s “The Other America” speech at Stanford University in 1967, the course contents will branch outward from here to place the selected works of Benítez-Rojo, Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Kara Walker, Tessa Mars, Édouard-Duval Carrié, Firelei Báez, and Édouard Glissant into a gestalt of ‘one-world’ relation.
2 credits
Spring 2028 Smith
Catalog chapter: Black Studies
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/black-studies

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