In 1988, Time published a range of articles on Hispanic culture in the United State, celebrating the supposed arrival of Hispanic music, visual art, and texts in the mainstream. However, the magazine’s enthusiastic headline »Magnífico: Hispanic Culture Breaks out of the Barrio« also reiterated common stereotypes about artists of Latin American and Caribbean descent by locating their cultural productions at the margins of US mainstream society and classifying them as a pinch of spice in the melting pot. Since then, the Hispanic population has not only come to represent an important part of US »ethnoracial pentagon« (Hollinger), but has also gained accrued visibility in music, visual arts, performance, drama, and literary texts. This is especially true for cultural productions by migrant or diaspora artists from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic – such as music stars Ricky Martin or J. Lo, visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or Pulitzer winners Junot Díaz and Nilo Cruz – but also includes works by Haitian Americans such as The Fugees or writer Edwidge Danticat.
This seminar will explore how Caribbean diaspora cultures from Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti evolved from the beginning of the 20th century on. Studying patterns of migration, community building and transnationalism, we will first try to understand the communities’ political, social, and cultural challenges in the United States while discussing recent concepts of transnationalism, diaspora, and intersectionality. Then, we will focus on the cultural expression of these communities, exploring the roots of Salsa music in New York diaspora culture, Nuyorican poetry and performance in the 1960s, and US Caribbean visual art. Finally, we will turn to artefacts and texts from the 2000s such as Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004) and Junot Díaz’ Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Taking a comprehensive approach to their representation of diasporic communities, we will analyze their politics of »straddling« (Flores) the past and the present, the Caribbean and the United States, and postcolonial imperatives and the expectancies of the U.S. cultural industry in order to localize them between the poles of de- and reterritorialization.
Das Seminar wird – in Abhängigkeit von den Sprachkenntnissen der Teilnehmenden – auf Englisch oder Deutsch abgehalten.
Leistungsnachweis: aktive Seminarvorbereitung, semesterbegleitende Aufgaben, Hausarbeit (Abgabe: 31.03.2021)