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Caribbean Histories: Colonialism, Resistance and Environmental Crisis

Module description

This interdisciplinary module focuses on the Caribbean region as a case study for exploring twenty-first century modes of imagining climate change and environmental catastrophe in the (post) colonial context to investigate the relationship between Caribbean histories of colonisation and exploitation, concomitant narratives and theories of climate change, climate crisis, resilience, and response. Through engaging with histories, stories, and practices of resistance across the Caribbean, you will uncover and examine the ways in which alternative imagined futures, to those of the dominant Anglo-American climate change discourse, empower communities impacted by climate change in the present.

Keywords: Caribbean history; culture; colonialism; environmental crisis; resistance; imagined futures.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The 2020s is the critical decade for climate change and, whilst this is arguably the biggest and most urgent crisis yet faced by humanity, it offers an opportunity to develop a global response with environmental justice, human rights, and resistance at its centre. To achieve this, we must explore and understand the relationship between diverse conceptualisations of climate change, colonial histories, and divergent ideological, epistemological, and theoretical imaginaries. Contemporary Western and Western-informed climate change discourse tends to be conceptualised in apocalyptic Judeo-Christian terms, with the climate crisis the ultimate destruction. The finality of this negates the experience of much of the colonised world, which has, for many years, lived with the effects of environmental catastrophe and climate change and has long developed creative, political, and theoretical forms of resistance as imagined alternative futures.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Develop a specialised knowledge and critical understanding of the importance of decolonial knowledge in approaches to combat environmental crises
• 2. Develop an understanding of the long durée of climate catastrophe and environmental crisis in the Caribbean region

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Understand and critically evaluate evidence connected to different historical and contemporary case studies and put them into conversation with the wider interdisciplinary scholarship
• 4. Competently research using a variety of resources such as archives, libraries, electronic resources

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Develop skills of collaboration and team working and build confidence in presenting an argument in different formats
• 6. Independently digest, select, and synthesise evidence and arguments to produce, to a deadline, a cogent argument

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary year to year as the module grows and responds to students’ feedback, the module will cover topics such as the environmental impact of plantation economies and monocropping; the plantationocene; resistance, revolt, rebellion, and revolution; oral histories and oral storytelling; post-colonial politics and decolonialism; topography and risk; black and indigenous ecologies; the arts as sites of resistance; the impact of tourism.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment. 

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%. 

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Baver, Sherries L and Deutsch Lynch, Barbara, Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms. Rutgers University Press, 2006.
• DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and Handley, George B., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Farnsworth, Paul (Ed), Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean. The University of Alabama Press, 2001.
• Grove, Richard H, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1880. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Munro, Martin, Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times. University of Virginia Press, 2015.
• Kirchberger, Ulrike, and Bennett, Brett M, Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change. The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
• Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
•  Sheller, Mimi, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. Routledge, 2003.
• Sheller, Mimi, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2020.  
• Thompson, Krista A., An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean. Duke University Press, 2006.

Key words search

Caribbean history; culture; colonialism; environmental crisis; resistance; imagined futures