COML5920 - Life, Death, and Revolution in Haiti

In the last few decades, Haiti has been known on the global stage for its repeated calamities: earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts followed by floods and vice versa, dictatorships, cholera, civil unrest, etc. These media representations, which foreground trauma and failure, tend to overshadow a momentous revolutionary past as well as a long tradition of thriving avant-garde literary and artistic movements. These negative representations are part and parcel of a centuries-long practice of epistemic violence against Haiti that began well before it declared its independence from France in 1804, at the end of a bloody revolution. In this course, we will seek a more nuanced understanding of Haiti by exploring the concepts of life, death, and revolution in a selection of literary texts, essays, articles, documents, and films. Our interdisciplinary approach will allow us to discuss voodoo, the figure of the zombi, gender, the environment, modernity, and the relationship between politics and poetics. This course is taught in French and is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.