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Page 1 of 3 LIT 6236 Fall 2013 Leah Rosenberg ( rosenber@ufl.edu ; (352) 294 2848) Tuesdays 12:50 3:50 Turlington 4112 To register : Send your name and UF ID to rosenber@ufl.edu Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of the Modern Caribbean This interdisciplinary, digital humanities course examines the intersecting material and cultural history of two mass migrations that fundamentally transformed the Carib bean and Latin America in the Caribbean to sustain its plantation economies and the emigration of Afro Caribbean workers to mainland Latin America to build the Panama Canal (and work on United Fruit Company plantations). The financial, cultural, and politi cal capital accumulated by these two groups of immigrants fueled the growth of the Caribbean middle class, the emergence of nationalism, trade unionism and national literatures. Yet, until the past two decades these migrations were often overlooked by h istorians, creative writers, and literary scholars. Now, however, historians and literary scholars are focusing their attention on these migrations as are creative writers As a result, a strong corpus of scholarship and contemporary literature about indenture and West Indian migration is emerging, while at the same time, a growing body of archival material from photographs to government reports and memoirs are becoming accessible, many digitally. This course originated out of the desire to e xamine the relationship between these histories and the literature they helped to produce as well as the desire to teach students how to combine historical research methods and literary analysis in the digital age. It explores the intersection of migration and labor history, ethnic and racial politics, and cultural production. It asks how everyday people experienced migration, indenture, and the challenges of life and work in the canal zone under Jim Crow A t the same time it considers how their cumulative experiences qua mass migrations transformed the political, economic, social, and cultural realities for the region. As importantly, it asks how their lives were recorded in official and private documents -in government records, newspapers, novels memo irs and memories (recorded in oral histories) and in the burgeoning photography industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur ies And last but hardly least, we explore how creative writers have integrated modern literary tradition is fundamentally interdisciplinary. We therefore invite students from a wide range of disciplines such as literature, art history, museum studies, history, geography, gen der studies, and Latin American, American, African American, and Asian studies to enroll T he course engages the intersection of these fields and is designed to help students develop research skills and produce an independent research project in their are a of expertise. Digital projects will be included in the Digital Library of the Caribbean ( www.dloc.com ). Further, the University of Florida is celebrating the centennial of the completion of the Panama Canal in spring 2014 with an interdisciplinary conference and exhibits using materials from the recently acquired Panama Canal Museum. Students will have ac cess to materials from this new collection and the opportunity to contribute to contribute to exhibits commemorating the centennial. Course objectives: Introduce theoretical analyses of and practical approaches to using colonial archival sources (e.g. p hotographs, maps, commission reports, newspapers, memoirs, letters)

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Page 2 of 3 Examine how historians creative writers, and literary scholars make use of colonial archives to illuminate and imagine the experience of indentured Asians in the Caribbean and West Indians workers on the Panama Canal Explore challenges posed by digital archiving (how can we not reproduce the colonial structure of existi ng historical archival materials?) Teach skills in digital archiving (producing metadata, exhibit labels, finding guides) and digital humanities (e.g. Omeka, PBworks, timelines, Zotero) Produce and publish digital research projects (such as finding guid es, curated exhibits, times lines) to be included in the Digital Library of the Caribbean ( www.dloc.com ) and when appropriate the conference and exhibits celebrating the Centennial of the completion of the Panama Canal to be held at UF in spring 2014 This course is being taught simultaneously at UF with Dr. Leah Rosenberg the University of Miami with Dr. Donette Francis and Amherst College with Professor Rhonda Cobham and will include collaboration of students at th e three institutions. It has been designed by faculty and librarians at the three institutions. Selected Literary texts: Herbert de Lisser Susan Proudleigh (Methuen & Co., 1915) available in http://dloc.com/UF00081174/00001 Maryse Conde, The Tree of Life David Dabydeen They Came in Ships: An Anthology of Indo Guyanese Prose and Poetry (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1998) Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge Claude McKay A Fie rce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion ( Verso, 2001) Edgar Mittelholzer, Corentyne Thunder (1941) Selected Historical and Critical Readings : Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History Ed. Ann Laura Stoler Duke UP, 2006. Trouillot, Ralph Silencing the Past (Boston,: Beacon Press, 1995), 1 30. Lose your moth er: a journey along the Atlantic slave route (2007 ) Verene Shepherd, (2002) Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (2008) Tejaswini Niranjan a Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006) Peter Szok. Wolf Tracks: Popular Art and Re Africanization in Twentieth Century Panama (2012) Anne Maxwell, Colonial photography and exhibitions : representations of the "n ative" and the making of European identities (1999) Rhonda Frederick, (2005) Selected Primary Sources Ralph Emmett Avery, et al. The Greatest Engineering Feat in the World at Panama ( 1915 )

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Page 3 of 3 Beau mont, Joseph. The New Slavery: An Account of the Indian and Chinese Immigrants in British Guiana in British Guiana ( 1871 ) Laura Mabel Brooking Collection ( http://web.uflib.ufl.e du/spec/manuscript/guides/brooking.htm ) Leonard Carpenter Panama Canal Collection ( http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides/panama_lc.htm ) S usie Pearl Core, Maid in Panama (1828) Isthmian Historical society. Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Worker Edited and introduced by Ruth C. Stuhl. Balboa Heights, C.Z., 1963 Jenkins, Edward, 1871. The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs London. http://dloc.com/AA00013942/0 0001 Kirke, Henry. Twenty Five Years in British Guiana 1898 Reprint Westport, Negro U Press, 1970. [We would need to find an original copy rather than the reprint.] Morton, Sarah. John Morton of Trinidad: pioneer missionary of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the East Indians in the British West Indies: journals, letters and papers /Toronto : Westminster Co.,Microform version in archive.org http://www.dloc.com/AA00013940/00001



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Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Modernity, and the Birth of Caribbean Literature Power and resistance, indenture and migration, exploitation and sexploitation, nationalism in a colonized world Anglophone Caribbean nationalism and national literature developed under these conditions in the decades following emancipation in 1 838 as planters struggled to maintain their wealth and power by importing indentured labor from China and India and hundreds of thousands of Afro Caribbeans, denied land and decent wages at home migrated to Latin America to work on United Fruit Company plantations and the Panama Canal The abolition of slavery and the slave trade, thus brought two mass migrations, two new diasporas that not only reshaped the racial and ethnic composition of the Caribbean and Latin America but also contributed to modern capitalism and global trade by literally reshaping the environment of Latin America through building massive corporate plantations and cutting a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The experience and infl uence of West Indian immigrants to Panama, and of Indian and Chinese in the West Indies play a profound role in the work of writers, such as Claude McKay, Herbert de Lisser, Seepersad Naipaul, and George Lamming who founded and shaped the West Indian lite rary tradition. Yet, with the impe rative to understand slavery from the bottom up and to dismantle the colonial narrative of race and slavery the post emancipation period and its fundamental transformations ha ve often been overlooked by historians and l iterary scholars. However, t he past two decades has seen a radical change, with historians and literary writers turning their attention to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and with the unearthing and digitization of both literature and hist orical documents by and about the Caribbean people. Students will contribute to th is new scholarship by producing finding guides and digital exhibitions to explicate and contextualize primary historical documents, and by incorporating this historical r esearch into their analyses of Caribbean literature. Students will also learn technology for analyzing and presenting historical sources, such as Omeka and VoiceThread and can contribute successful projects, particularly exhibits and finding guides to th e Digital Library of the Caribbean ( www.dloc.com ). This course is being taught simultaneously at UF, the University of Miami, and Amherst College, and has been designed by faculty and librarians at the three institution s.