Given the volume of reading for the course, I have prepared a list of general questions you may wish to consider to help focus your reading. Given the theme of the course, these questions focus on the ocean as a category of analysis. You are certainly welcome to riff off these questions when you are leading discussion, adapting them to the text under consideration. The guided questions are available here.
Click the headings below to navigate the reading list or download a PDF here.
Required Literature, Film, Music, and CriticismMaryse Condé’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986)
Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990)
Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1998)
Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)
Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)
Novelty (available on password-protected download page here)
Emoji Dick, Herman Melville’s classic whale tale, as told by Japanese emoticons (Ch. 1-2)
Novella (available from Project Gutenberg)
Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855)
Memoir (available from Project Gutenberg)
Olaudah Equiano’s The Narrative of the Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) (Ch. 1-2)
Emily Kugler’s “Equiano’s English Subscribers List”
Film (available through NOBLE or Amazon Streaming)
Amistad (1997)
Music (available on YouTube)
Drexciya, “Aquarazorda” (1994)
Drexciya, “Dehydration” (1994)
Interview with Drexciya (00.00-4:30 minutes)
Philip Sherburne, “Drexciya: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller”
Kodwo Eshun, “Drexciya: Fear of a Wet Planet”
Blum, Hester. “Introduction: Oceanic Studies.” Atlantic Studies 10.2 (2013): 151-55.
—. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 670-677.
Cohen, Margaret. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 657-662.
Coulson, Douglas M. “Distorted Records in ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Slave Rebellion Tradition.” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 22.1 (2010): 1-34.
Crane, Jacob. “Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass, and the Limits of the Black Atlantic.” Postcolonial Text 6.4 (2011).
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 703-12.
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “A Sea of Texts: The Atlantic World, Spatial Mapping, and Equiano’s Narrative.” Religion and Space in the Atlantic World. Eds. John Corrigan, David Bodenhamer, and Trevor Harris. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, forthcoming. http://edillo4.wix.com/equiano-gis#!
Eckstein, Lars. “The Pitfalls of Picturing Atlantic Slavery: Steven Spielberg’s Amistad vs. Guy Deslaurier’s The Middle Passage.” Cultural Studies Review 10.1 (2008): 72-84.
Gilroy, Paul. “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity.” The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. 1-40.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 721-729.
Matsuda, Matt K. “AHR Forum: The Pacific.” The American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 758-780.
Warren, Lenora D. “Insurrection at Sea: Violence, the Slave Trade, and the Rhetoric of Abolition.” Atlantic Studies 10.2 (2013): 197-210.
Wilson, Rob. “Doing Cultural Studies Inside APEC: Literature, Cultural Identity, and Global/Local Dynamics in the American Pacific.” Comparative Literature 53.4 (Autumn 2001): 389-403.
Yaegar, Patricia. “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons.” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010): 523-545.
