HIST 6131

A Greater Caribbean: New Approaches to Caribbean History

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

This course is taught in conjunction with a course of the same title and scope at Yale University with Professor Anne Eller.  Over the thirteen weeks, we will engage with new work emerging about the Greater Caribbean in the context of Latin America, the African Diaspora, Atlantic History, Global History, comparative emancipation from chattel slavery, and the study of global revolution.  Students will make in-class presentations that locate these titles in a deeper historiography with classic texts.  This course crosses imperial boundaries of archives and historiography, in order to consider the intersecting allegiances, identities, itineraries, and diaspora of peoples, in local, hemispheric, and global context. Some central questions include: What is the lived geography of the Caribbean at different moments, and how does using different geographic and temporal frameworks help approach the region's history? What role did people living in this amorphously demarcated region play in major historical transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did the varied, but interconnected processes of Caribbean emancipation impact economic and political systems throughout the Atlantic and beyond? The course will conclude with a mini conference in which students of both universities will come together to discuss the state of the field and future directions in Caribbean history.

When Offered Spring.

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