This course will examine the geographically wide-ranging history, knowledge formations, and cultural productions of the global South, defined as the greater Atlantic sphere spanning the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and regions of Central America and West Africa. We will start by surveying the long colonial history of conflict and interaction in the West Indies between European settlers, enslaved African migrants, and indigenous populations, and the singularly complex arrays of locally determined ethnic, cultural, and linguistic formations that they produced. In addressing this history, we will also consider the region’s site-specific definitions of race, migration, settlement, identity, and cultural hybridity. We will then consider the ways in which these notions, along with the region’s own history and landscape, are dramatized in its twentieth-century literature and culture, by reading Gothic works of historical fiction (Carpentier, Faulkner), epic poetry (Walcott), and travel narrative (Hurston), as well as by track the aesthetic development of the region’s music, visual art, and architecture. (B, H)