“Caribbean Waters: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene” with Professor Shalini Puri

ENLGIT 2161  CRN: 32964

This seminar will pursue two related lines of inquiry: 

First, it will study the contemporary planetary water crisis through the lens of the Caribbean. What concepts does the Caribbean yield that might provide useful alternatives to some dominant approaches to the Anthropocene? How do contemporary struggles around water fit with longer histories of extractivism? What dialogues can we create between Critical Ocean Studies and the study of the politics of freshwater?  What genres of history, reportage, and art shape our imagining of Caribbean waters––and how do we respond to generic and archival absences? For example, what representational alternatives might we find to the spectacularization of both beauty and disaster that is familiar from so many representations of the global south?  

Second, as scholars located in the global north, we will ask what forms of allyship, documentation, witnessing, and amplification can we practice in support of the global south? What does public engagement or the engaged humanities look like when the site of engagement is not local (a particularly resonant question for Global or Transnational Studies)? How does one practice an immersive scholarship from across an ocean? What affordances and pitfalls do the digital humanities offer in such a project?  

Our seminar will engage several Caribbean archives and artistic and activist practices––both born-digital ones and ones that have resisted digital mediatization. A workshop with visiting artists or poets will be woven into the course, and we will experiment with various poetic and visual forms, playing at the meeting point of case-study, data, and art.