| Using the notion of creolization, popularized in Caribbean studies, and now finding its way into the general academic lexicon describing the cultures of world populations, the course examines the cultural politics of place through notions of citizenship and citizenness, the latter referring to the strategies adopted by people to create spaces in the diverse but linked geographies of South Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands, during colonial and postcolonial times. These territories, represent a mix of approaches to inclusions and exclusions and freedoms and therefore offer rich material for assessing questions of power. Through films, fiction, and various texts, the course focuses on pivotal socio-cultural and state practices, that enable or disable people’s efforts to build spaces of comfort and homeliness. We ask what sorts of expectations of states of freedoms have shaped new and diverse ideas about homes, and vice versa, and how have they contributed to alter-native states of being in the world, and under what circumstances? What sorts of transformations have occurred among state spaces, given these various engagements. |
