Ethics-oriented exercise focusing on the Black Code (or le Code Noir)
1) The text of the Black Code, used in all four courses, FRE 2701/FRE 361, LTT 150, LTT 361, and LTT 461
2) The activity sheet for analysis and discussion of the Black Code (questions, prompts and directions), again used in all courses referenced here.
Excerpt from Rue Cases-Nègres [Sugar Cane Alley] (1983), a film directed by Euzhan Palcy
1) Information about the film on IMDB
2) Five-minute excerpt on YouTube, a scene where the elderly cane worker, Médouze, recounts his own father's experience of the end of slavery in Martinique to his young protégé, José. Used in all courses.
Group work (preparation for textual analysis and discussion): Lyonel Trouillot's Street of Lost Footsteps [Rue des pas perdus, 1998]
This short novel is extremely difficult for students to parse because it is told by three different narrators, with few explicit indications that the narrative voice changes from one chapter to the next. Additionally, one of the characters hallucinates or loses his sanity after being the victim of extreme violence during a night of blood-letting in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, against a historical backdrop of civil unrest, Tonton-Macoutes [the death-squad-ish security forces set up by Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier] and successive coups d'état, from the end of the Duvalier regime through . This activity organizes the class into three groups, each of which follows one narrator through the novel, noting major plot twists and turns, symbolic language and psychological impacts. The three groups then join together to note the similarities and differences among the divergent narrative threads. We then try to articulate the overarching meaning of the novel.
Activity sheet for Street of Lost Footsteps, used in LTT 461 only.