Course Descriptions -Graduate
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6000: Theory and Conceptualisation of Culture
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 1
Description
The course explores the theories of culture within Cultural Studies. It examines key issues in the cultural debates and explores how the various concepts of culture can be applied to the study of everyday life. Special attention will be paid to the Caribbean context as we examine issues of class, gender, race and ethnicity as well as how culture is produced and (re)presented in the Caribbean. The aim of the course is to provide students with the opportunity to wrestle with the productive and important questions that arise from current cultural debates. Students will then examine the following topics: Introduction: The Cultural; The Frankfurt School and Marxism: Marx, Althusser, Gramsci; Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School; Concepts of the Cultural: Mapping Cultural Studies; Structuralism and Poststructuralism; Orientalism; Slavery and Colonialism; Creolisation and Hybridity; Rituals of Resistance: Youth and SubCultures; Race, Class and Representation; Power, Desire and the Body; Space and Place; The Tourist Gaze; Television, Texts and Audiences; and Popular Culture
Assessment
50% Coursework / 50% Final Examination
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6010: Debates in Caribbean Cultural Identity
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 1
Description
This course allows students to examine key issues in research on the construction of identity/ies in the Caribbean. Students will wrestle with the questions of what defines the Caribbean/West Indies/Antilles and the relationship of the Caribbean Diaspora to these entities. They will also examine the ideological debates surrounding identity formation with special reference to the issues pertaining to the colonial and the Post-Colonial context. The relationship between identity, race, culture, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in the Caribbean will also be explored. Consequently, such concepts as creolisation, interculturation, creole identities, hybridity, essentialism, national and diasporic identities will be assessed. Starting with a survey of the region, the course explores the making of Caribbean identity/ties by examining the following themes: Who needs Identity; Mimicry; Indigeneity and Caribbean Modernity; Creolité and the Francophone Caribbean; Cuba and Resistance; Colour, Culture and Hierarchy I: History and Belonging; Colour, Culture and Hierarchy II: Ownership; Diasporic Identities: Locating Home; Sexual Identities; Cricket, Empire and the Post-Colonial Caribbean; Tourism: Consuming the Exotic; Socio-Cultural Dynamics of HIV/AIDS; and Globalisation and Cultural Commodification
Assessment
50% Coursework / 50% Final Examination
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6030: Dynamics of Caribbean Culture
CREDITS: 8
SEMESTER: 1 AND 2
Description
This course is designed to provide an understanding of the cultural dynamics of Caribbean societies and their diasporas. It will explore issues of identity, critical consciousness, ways of knowing and provide
insights into music, festivals, visual art, sport, language, literary and oral discourse and the religious expressions of Caribbean societies.
The objectives are: To analyse distinctive Caribbean cultural practices and creative expressions; To locate Caribbean cultural concepts, and processes within their global frames; To articulate relationships of power such as class, ethnicity, colonialism as they are implicated in Caribbean culture; To analyse the gender dynamics within Caribbean cultural expressions; To interpret the ways in which these cultural dynamics are connected with development; and To assess the theoretical implications that emerge from these phenomena.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6050: Caribbean Cultural Diasporas
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 2
Description
This course explores the complex cultural connections between Caribbean peoples in the region and diaspora. It seeks to understand the question of transnational identity as a lived experience, as well as the meaning of H/home. The course explores the meanings of the Diasporic experience by reviewing the history/ies of migration and by examining the racial and gender issues that arise. Caribbean cultural circuits created through festivals as well as the spiritual practices that link the metropolitan cities of Toronto, New York and London will also be assessed. As a result, this study of Caribbean Cultural Diasporas challenges the concept of frontiers and boundaries and examines the roots/routes used to create and re-create the Caribbean experience in the metropole.
Assessment
TBA
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6100: Methods of Inquiry in Cultural Studies
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 2
Description
The course explores the problems encountered in cultural research and guides students through the methodological approaches applicable to Cultural Studies. By examining the conceptual formulations that constitute knowledge (epistemology), it assesses how that knowledge is to be validated and verified (methodology).
The course explores such questions as how to read culture as a text, how to shape a theory of culture and the extent to which intellectuals and legislators are appropriate agents for the making of cultural policy.
The course also provides a comparative look at the anthropological, empirical and political approaches to the study of culture/s. Subsequently, for example, students will follow the debates between Mervyn Alleyne and Sydney Mintz on the formation of Caribbean culture and Clifford Geertz on the anthropological approach to the study of Balinese culture. They will also explore questions arising in the study of indigenous cultures, such as the Maori of New Zealand. The course provides students with the frameworks for critical analysis and research activity in Cultural Studies.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6201: Caribbean Multilingual Lexicography
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 2
Description
The primary aim of this course is to introduce the basic principles of multilingual lexicography in general and Caribbean multilingual lexicography in particular. Lexicography in general seeks to chronicle the culture of the given language or languages that it is treating and can be either monolingual or multilingual. Caribbean multilingual lexicography begins with work in the three major official languages of the Caribbean, English, French and Spanish, with French Creole included, but will later progress to Dutch and ultimately to Papiamento and Portuguese. Caribbean multilingual lexicography is thematic in approach, that is, it explores particular topics rather than seeking to inventory the entire lexicon of Caribbean life and culture. Consequently, specific areas of the lexicon will be looked at in depth, such as flora, fauna, foods, folklore, and festivals, to begin with and the principles of data collection will be explained and applied. The treatment of the data collected will then be fully explored. The study of Caribbean multilingual lexicography is intended to provide a useful aid in the teaching of vocabulary in context and of morphosyntax for language teachers. The language of a people reflects its culture and the course will assist participants to understand better the culture of the non-English-speaking people of the Caribbean. It will aid them to appreciate the fact that there is a Caribbean identity and it is multicultural.
Assessment
TBA
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6230: Caribbean Popular and Creative Culture
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 1
Description
This graduate course will build on some of the work covered in the two undergraduate courses in Caribbean popular culture. This course acknowledges that “popular culture” is a very broad area of study and engagement within the academy. It however wants to provide an avenue by which students can begin to undertake analysis of specific areas within this field. It recognizes that “popular culture” often refers to those areas of expression that are subversive, countercultural, and which challenge more traditional ways of knowing and ways of doing. While this course will engage and interrogate notions of the “popular” and other important contested concepts, it also wants to provide a context for an examination of popular expression as creative process. In effect, the course therefore examines the contradictory nature of popular expression. The reference to “creative culture” in the title also allows for an examination of late 20th century responses by Caribbean governments, practitioners, private sector institutions, and education centres to the repositioning of culture globally. The course takes note of the ways in which Caribbean culture is affected by and responds to international phenomena. To this end, the course will concern itself with a set of areas. These areas relate to specific genres of expression, or specific movements, or specific conceptual and practical phenomena which continue to preoccupy scholars of popular culture.
Assessment
TBA
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6270: Under Western Eyes: Rethinking Cultural Hegemony in Caribbean Gender Relations
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 2
Description
This course is designed to question the canonical, unitary and hegemonic aspects of Caribbean gender relations as reinforced by culture. It provides a feminist critique of the production of knowledge and power. Using this feminist critique of knowledge production, Under Western Eyes: Rethinking Cultural Hegemony in Caribbean Gender Relations draws on Mohanty’s critical distance from hegemonic forms of representation and prompts students to addresses questions of identity construction, and intersections of race and class in the representations of gender in the Caribbean. Throughout the course students will analyse the dialectical relationship between gender and culture in which gender hierarchies reinforce forms of cultural power and conversely, the impact that cultural and social phenomena have had on how various constituencies of Caribbean men and women experience their bodies, gender identities, relationship with and among each other and the state. The course will survey how ‘nation forming’ gestures such as colonialism, nationalism have formed our ‘collective’ imagination of Caribbean gender identities and hence the experiences and practices of gender.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6500: Research Methodology for Cultural Practitioners
CREDITS: 4
SEMESTER: 2
Description
This course affords students the tools required to conduct research in Caribbean culture. It will examine the conceptual formulations that constitute knowledge while it assesses how that knowledge is validated and verified. The course places emphasis on such aspects as the language of scholarship, the preparation and presentation of a scholarly paper as well as the research techniques for the study of culture.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6900: Diploma Research Paper/Project
CREDITS: 9
SEMESTER: 2
Description: Research Paper
Upon completion of their coursework (particularly CLTR 6500), candidates should submit a research proposal to the Coordinator of the Cultural Studies Programme. Once the proposal has been approved, a Supervisor will be appointed to guide the candidate in her/his research. The research paper must be 12000 words in length, exclusive of bibliography and footnotes.
: Project
Candidates can present their findings as follows: as performance, as a documentary, as video/film, as a work of art. Other formats can be employed, subject to the approval of the supervisor. The project must be presented with an accompanying analysis of not less than 8000 words, exclusive of bibliography and footnotes.
Assessment
100% Project Report /Research Paper
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6990: MA Research paper
CREDITS: 12
Description
Students produce a research paper of approximately 15,000 words under the supervision of a member of Faculty.
Assessment
100% Research Paper
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6901
TITLE: Research Field 1
CREDITS: 5
Description
Students study a reading list of prescribed texts in an area relevant to their MPhil or PhD thesis under the supervision of a member of Faculty.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 6902: Research Field 2
CREDITS: 5
Description
Students study a reading list of prescribed texts in an area relevant to their MPhil or PhD thesis (but different from that studied for CLTR 6901) under the supervision of a member of Faculty.
Assessment
100% Coursework
COURSE CODE: CLTR 7000: MPhil Thesis Cultural Studies
CREDITS: 0
Description
Students produce a thesis of approximately 40,000 - 50,000 words under the supervision of a member of Faculty.
Assessment
Pass/Fail
COURSE CODE: CLTR 8000: PhD Thesis Cultural Studies
CREDITS: 0
Description
Students produce a thesis of approximately 80,000 words under the supervision of a member of Faculty.
Assessment
Pass/Fail