French 365ca - Topics in Francophone Literature and Culture-Food, Hunger, Memory: Literature of the Caribbean

Food and its absence are persistent themes in Caribbean literature. Cooking and culinary practices serve as a means of preserving cultural identities, yet can also reinforce colonial visions of the Caribbean as an exoticized space. Hunger figures as an indictment of that colonial history and of contemporary global inequities. Through studies of folktales, short stories, poetry and novels, this course offers an introduction to the literature and major theoretical movements of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti, with a focus on how cultural memory is inscribed in metaphors of consumption.