'Cari-beans’: Teaching Caribbean Literature in the Indian Ocean

This essay discusses the uses of and responses to pedagogical methodologies developed during an introductory course on contemporary Caribbean literature taught to undergraduate English majors at the Université de La Réunion. Offering a brief overview of La Réunion and the context of the course, it discusses students’ responses to a transversal approach adopted for the teaching of Caribbean literature. Trans-local readings of Caribbean and Indian Ocean histories invited students to analyze intersecting narratives of key topics such as resistance to enslavement. The parallel teaching and integration of translation seminars allowed for further exploration of the situatedness of Creole and non-Creole languages and generated strategies to transpose Caribbean and Indian Ocean specificities for various audiences. Student responses surfaced lingering legacies of (neo)colonialism in La Réunion, and suggest how the teaching of trans-pelagic connections can create spaces for their analysis and critique.