|
Instructors: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
S Lit.N-Amerikas
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Waiting list:
Waiting list quota: 50%
Contents:
This seminar addresses the cultural, technological, and political aspects of the production and economy of cane sugar in the Caribbean and in North America since earliest colonization. Slavery, transatlantic triangular trade, colonization and empire, so-called 'sugar wars', the food industry and the politics of sugar and rum consumption are going to be treated. The texts we are going to read and take as points of departure are James Grainger's long poem The Sugar Cane of 1764 and Fernando Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar of 1940, a sociological treatise introducing and for the first time defining the term transculturation, plus one further novelistic, filmic, or musical treatment of the topic. The literary and generic elements of the works are going to be read in relation to the cultural and political work these writings and artworks perform.
Course requirements are attendance, participation, seminar presentation, and a research paper of 15 to 20 pages. Texts: Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1940 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); James Grainger's The Sugar Cane as printed in John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764) (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
|
