Emily Taylor , Ph.D.

Instructor

Office: 465 PLC
Ph: 6-3965
E-mail: etaylor1@uoregon.edu

B.A. in English and Spanish, University of Northern Iowa, 2001

Ph.D. University of Oregon, 2009

Caribbean Literature, Latino/a Literature, the novel and narrative

“To many, the Caribbean continues to be an unruly and promiscuous place. Territories that once served as sex havens for the colonial elite are today frequented by sex tourists, and several of the island economies now depend upon the region’s racialized, sexualized image.” --Kemala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor

Representations of sexuality in the Caribbean (and of the Caribbean) have historically served the interests of those in power, whether it be a colonial power or a patriarchal power or both. Men and women are depicted as hypersexualized beings in order to “sell” the Caribbean in tourism discourse. In this course, we will examine an emergent body of Caribbean literature that responds to these representations and articulates Caribbean sexualities in relation to race, gender, class, national identity and colonialism. Through selected critical readings in postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, we will consider what is at stake, politically and aesthetically, in these representations of sex and sexuality. [Fall]

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!”—Caliban, The Tempest

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, first performed in 1611, has been subject to intense critical and creative scrutiny almost since its appearance. It is Shakespeare’s most radically reworked and rewritten play, staging as it does complex questions concerning nature, culture, language, and power. It is also widely interpreted as an allegorical account of the European colonial encounter with the New World. In this regard, it has been the source text for a number of writers and scholars in the Americas that seek to reimagine the colonial encounter not from the perspective of the colonizers but rather from the perspective of the colonized. This course will consider Shakespeare’s original play as well as a selection of these postcolonial texts from the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Readings will draw from a variety of literary genres, including plays, poems, short stories, essays, and novels. [Winter]

“Revulsion and fear have been the most common responses to leprosy since biblical times, yet there is slight medical basis for the recurring stigmatization of a disease with such a very low level of infection. Leprosy, it seems, has had extraordinary potential for becoming more than itself.” --Rod Edmund, Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History

In this course we will consider cultural texts from or about the Caribbean, Hawai’i and Latin America that are centrally concerned with the representation of leprosy. We will read these representations within the political and historical context of U.S. and European colonialism to consider how the disease functions in fictional texts to represent colonial control and regulation of human bodies, sexual relationships, the fear of difference and racial mixing, economic exploitation, and the relationship of the self to the Other. Our central focus for the course will be how representations of leprosy function metaphorically to represent historical and political problems in the Americas. [Spring]