Introduction to Caribbean Literature: Voices from Jamaica and Trinidad

Teaching Language

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Although the course is planned to be taught in English, if all enrolled students demonstrate proficiency in the Portuguese language and there is no need for the use of English, the course will be taught in Portuguese.

goals

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This summer course offers an introduction to literature from the English-speaking Caribbean, focusing on Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. Through poetry, short fiction, and selected excerpts from novels, the students will explore how writers from these islands represent history, culture, language, and identity. The course pays particular attention to the relationship between literature and Caribbean cultural forms. The students will examine how writers engage with themes such as colonial legacies, national identity, migration, and everyday life in Caribbean societies.

Programme

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Session 1: Introducing Caribbean Literature: History, Language, and Culture 

• Historical background: colonialism, slavery, and independence in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago;
• The emergence of Caribbean literary traditions;
• Trinidadian Creole, Jamaican Patois and oral storytelling;
• Jamaica and Trinidad as literary centers.

Session 2 — Jamaica: “Nation Language” and Cultural Identity 

• The role of patois in challenging colonial linguistic hierarchies;
• The emergence of a national cultural consciousness;
• Diaspora and Transnational Black Identity.
• Authors: Louise Bennett (selected poems); Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, excerpts).

Session 3: Trinidad: Carnival, Performance, and Society 

• Construction and expression of identity through masquerade and performance;
• Representations of class divisions, poverty, and everyday life in Port of Spain;
• Carnival as a historical form of resistance rooted in Afro-Caribbean traditions and collective memory;
• Authors: Earl Lovelace (The Dragon Can’t Dance, excerpts).

Session 4 — Migration and Diaspora 

• Postwar Caribbean migration and the experience of the Windrush generation in Britain;
• Challenges in negotiating identity, home, and belonging in a new society;
• The emotional, cultural, and historical ties between migrants and the Caribbean;
• Authors: Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners, excerpts) and Andrea Levy (Small Island, excerpts).

Session 5: Contemporary Caribbean Voices 

• Spiritual beliefs, folklore, and the supernatural in Caribbean storytelling;
• Revisiting historical events and collective memory to explore the identities of communities in Jamaica and Trinidad;
• Kei Miller (Augustown, excerpts); Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (When We Were Birds, excerpts).

Bibliography

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• Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
• Brown, J. D. (2015). Beyond Windrush: Rethinking postwar Anglophone Caribbean literature. University Press of Mississippi.
• Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990)
• Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.
• Ramchand, K. (2001). The West Indian novel and its background (2nd ed.). Ian Randle Publishers.

tuition fees

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See table in informações úteis.

teachers

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Carlotta Pisano – PhD candidate in Modern Literatures and Culture at NOVA FCSH. Her research focuses on the Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon, particularly his carnivalesque writings during the London period (1955–1979). Her broader interests include postcolonial literature in English-speaking countries, the Caribbean diaspora and soundscapes. Recently, she completed a research stay at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad and Tobago). She also has over ten years of experience in Higher Education and is the instructor of the Ideas Club at SUPERNOVA Foundation Programme, where she teaches students the importance of intercultural communication, diversity and inclusion through weekly debates.

Rogério Miguel Puga – Rogério Miguel Puga is Associate Professor with Habilitation at NOVA FCSH. He is an integrated researcher at CETAPS and a collaborator researcher at CHAM. He has authored more than 100 books, book chapters and articles and his research interests include: contemporary English literature, post-colonial and decolonial studies, history of Macau and of the Portuguese and British empires.