Lecture: Archipelic Stories. Reconceiving Identities through Carribean Fiction

LECTURE in the GGS Teaching Assistantship Programme 2018:

Eleonora Rapisardi: Archipelic Stories. Reconceiving Identities through Carribean Fiction

(no regisration needed)

ABSTRACT

This lecture will give a brief overview of Anglophone Literature in the Caribbean. While focusing on themes such as the deconstruction of national myths and identity renegotiation, I will try to make sense of the peculiarities of Anglophone Caribbean literature and how its study can contribute to the panorama of postcolonial literature and world literature as well.

As my focus will be on the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, the first part of the lecture will be an introduction to this area so that the analysis of the selected novels can be understood by people with little or no knowledge on the subject.  In the second part of my lecture I will present some novels and discuss how they renegotiate official history’s accounts and national identity, and what kind of renewed vision are they providing to the reader.

Some of the questions I will seek to answer are: how are narrative contributing to form and change national identity? What kind of values are conveyed through the narrative process? How are these narratives constructed?

At the end of the lecture some time will be dedicated to the Q&A. The group will also be invited to participate actively during the lecture.