Caribbean Literature Syllabus: A Ready-to-Teach 15-Week Plan

This page gives you a complete, editable 15-week Caribbean literature syllabus, built for a standard 3-credit course and ready to paste into your own course shell. It comes with learning outcomes, a full week-by-week reading schedule, an assessment breakdown, sample assignment prompts, and copy-ready policy language, all modeled on real courses like the Caribbean Literature Syllabus at Rutgers SAS-Newark.

Copy the sections below directly, or adapt them: swap in your own institution’s contact block, adjust the reading load to your calendar, and substitute texts where your library’s holdings differ. The anchor texts stay fixed across most versions of this course because they carry the field: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Derek Walcott’s poetry and Miguel Street, Michelle Cliff’s poems, and Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone. Where the syllabus needs a contemporary counterweight, Maroon House Press titles slot in as classroom-ready diaspora and folklore fiction.

Here’s what you’re working with at a glance:

Credits: 3
Format: 15-week semester, twice-weekly 75-minute sessions or once-weekly 150-minute seminar
Contact: [Instructor Name], Office Hours, [Email]
Scope: Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and diasporic Caribbean writing, 19th century to present

Key Takeaways

A complete Caribbean literature syllabus needs a 15-week structure, cross-linguistic scope, canonical anchor texts, and assessments that reward oral, visual, and written work equally.

Point	Details
Anchor the semester with five core texts	Kincaid’s A Small Place, Walcott’s poems and Miguel Street, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone, and Cliff’s poems form the non-negotiable core.
Pair long texts with short media	Balance a full-length novel with a poem, film clip, or recording in the same week to keep weekly workload sustainable.
Grade beyond the traditional essay	Build participation, short papers, a midterm, and a scaffolded final project (podcast or research essay) into a 15 to 35% weighted mix.
Teach Caribbean theory early, not late	Introduce Glissant’s creolization or Mackey’s paracritical hinge attached to a text students already know, not bundled into one dense week.
Extend the canon with contemporary voices	Titles from Maroon House Press bring folklore and diaspora themes into the present without displacing canonical anchors.

Building Your Caribbean Literature Syllabus: The Full Template
What Does a 15-Week Caribbean Literature Schedule Look Like?
What Should Students Be Able to Do by the End of the Course?
How Should You Grade a Caribbean Literature Course?
Setting Policies That Support a Diverse Classroom
Building Full Assignments and a Reusable Rubric
Curating Contemporary Voices Alongside the Canon
Where This Syllabus Template Comes From
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources

Building Your Caribbean Literature Syllabus: The Full Template

A strong Caribbean literature syllabus does three things at once: it defines its geographic and linguistic scope up front, it sequences texts so students see historical throughlines rather than a random anthology, and it grades work in ways that reward close reading as much as original synthesis. Here’s the full template, section by section.

Course description

Caribbean Literature: History, Memory, and Form surveys prose, poetry, and theory from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean alongside diasporic writing from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The course treats the region not as a single literary tradition but as a set of overlapping ones, shaped by plantation slavery, indentureship, colonial education, and successive waves of migration. Students read across genres, including a novel, a memoir/polemic, poetry collections, and short fiction, and encounter Caribbean-specific theoretical frameworks rather than applying imported postcolonial models by default. A Rutgers introductory syllabus uses this same cross-linguistic framing, tying migration, non-belonging, and modernity directly to the reading list rather than treating them as background themes.

The course also draws on interdisciplinary material. Film, recorded music, and oral history excerpts appear alongside the printed texts, following the model used in the SSA Caribbean Literature and Culture syllabus, which treats scribal and oral traditions as equally legitimate primary sources.

Learning outcomes overview

The full breakdown of outcomes lives in its own section below, but the short version: by the end of the semester, students should be able to read Caribbean texts against their historical context, compare literary strategies across linguistic zones, and apply at least one Caribbean-specific theoretical concept in their own writing.

Weekly topics at a glance

The detailed week-by-week table comes later in this guide. At the structural level, the semester moves in four movements: foundational historical context (weeks 1 to 3), Anglophone core texts (weeks 4 to 8), cross-linguistic and diasporic expansion (weeks 9 to 12), and theory-and-synthesis weeks that lead into the final project (weeks 13 to 15).

Assessment breakdown

Assessment	Weight	Due	Description
Participation and discussion	15%	Ongoing	In-class discussion, reading responses, oral contributions
Short response papers	20%	Weeks 5 and 10	3 to 4 pages each, close reading of a single assigned text
Midterm essay	20%	Week 8	Comparative essay across two assigned texts
Final project	35%	Week 15	Research essay or public-facing project (podcast, digital exhibit)
Group presentation	15%	Weeks 12 to 13	Team presentation on a theoretical framework applied to a text

This distribution echoes what shows up across published syllabi: grading models built around short papers, a midterm, group work, and a capstone project rather than a single high-stakes final exam, a pattern confirmed by the assessment structure in the Rutgers syllabus.

Grading scale and essential policies

Use a standard letter scale (A, A minus, B plus, and so on) unless your institution mandates otherwise. Core policies to paste in:

Attendance: Two unexcused absences permitted; each additional absence lowers the participation grade.
Late work: Accepted within 48 hours with a one-third letter grade penalty per day, absent documented emergencies.
Academic integrity: Standard institutional policy applies; group projects require an individual contribution statement.
Required formats: All written work submitted as PDF; podcast or multimedia projects submitted as MP3/MP4 with a written transcript or artist statement.
Accessibility: All video content captioned; scanned readings provided as searchable PDFs, not image scans.

What Does a 15-Week Caribbean Literature Schedule Look Like?

Here’s the week-by-week breakdown. Each week pairs a primary text with a shorter secondary reading or media clip, which keeps the workload sustainable and gives you something to screen or play in class. This structure mirrors what the Rivera syllabus at Rutgers does: pair a longer canonical text with short-form poems or essays so no single week overloads students.

Week	Theme	Primary text	Secondary media	Discussion prompt
1	Framing the Caribbean	Introduction handout, map/timeline exercise	Short documentary clip on plantation economies	What does “Caribbean” mean as a literary category rather than a geographic one?
3	Colonialism and tourism	Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place	None	How does Kincaid’s second-person address implicate the reader?
3	Decolonizing the mind	Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (selected chapters)	Interview footage or recorded lecture on Fanon	How does Fanon’s psychology of colonization complicate a purely economic reading of empire?
4	Village life and voice	Derek Walcott, Miguel Street (selections)	Recording of Walcott reading his own poetry	How does Walcott balance comedy and loss in a single sketch?
5	Poetry and place	Derek Walcott, selected poems (“A Far Cry from Africa,” excerpts from Omeros)	Reggae or calypso track for tonal contrast	(Short paper 1 due)
6	Memory and the feminine voice	Michelle Cliff, selected poems and prose excerpts	Oral history recording, Caribbean elder testimony	How does Cliff use fragmentation as a formal choice, not just a stylistic one?
5	Folklore and the historical novel	Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Daughters of the Stone (Part 1)	Music clip referencing Afro-Puerto Rican bomba tradition	How does the novel use multigenerational structure to narrate slavery’s aftermath?
8	Folklore and the historical novel, continued	Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Daughters of the Stone (Part 3)	None	(Midterm essay due)
9	Francophone Caribbean	Excerpt from a Francophone Caribbean novel in translation	Documentary clip on Martinique or Haiti	How does the francophone text’s relationship to French differ from Anglophone texts’ relationship to English?
10	Hispanophone Caribbean	Short fiction from a Hispanophone Caribbean writer	Recorded oral history or son montuno track	(Short paper 3 due)
13	Diaspora and migration	Contemporary diaspora short fiction (Maroon House Press title, see reading list)	Interview or podcast segment with the author	How does the diaspora narrative revise or extend the homeland narrative students read earlier?
12	Theory: Glissant	Excerpt from Glissant on creolization and detour	None	How does “detour” as a concept reframe migration differently than “exile” does?
13	Theory: Mackey and beyond	Excerpt on the paracritical hinge	Group presentations begin	Group presentations on theoretical frameworks
13	Synthesis and gender	Return to Cliff or Llanos-Figueroa through a gender-focused lens	Student-selected media	Group presentations continue
15	Final projects	Student presentations or podcast screenings	None	Final project due

For a shorter 10-week version, cut weeks 9 and 10 into a single combined week and fold the theory readings (weeks 12 and 13) into a single session. For an extended graduate seminar, add a full week on early regional print culture and Victorian-era Anglophone Caribbean writing, since over-indexing on post-1950s material is a documented gap in even strong syllabi, according to course notes from the University of Florida’s Caribbean literature offerings.

What Should Students Be Able to Do by the End of the Course?

Learning outcomes should be specific enough that you can point to a graded assignment and say “this proves the student met this outcome.” Vague outcomes like “understand Caribbean culture” don’t survive an accreditation review. Here’s a set that does, closely aligned with the outcomes used in the SSA Caribbean Literature and Culture syllabus:

Close reading: Analyze form, voice, and narrative structure in a single primary text. (Mapped to: short response papers)
Contextual analysis: Situate a text within its specific historical moment, colonial or postcolonial. (Mapped to: midterm essay)
Comparative frameworks: Compare literary strategies across at least two linguistic zones (Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone). (Mapped to: midterm essay, final project)
Theoretical application: Apply one Caribbean-specific theoretical concept, such as Glissant’s creolization or Mackey’s paracritical hinge, to a primary text. (Mapped to: group presentation)
Research and synthesis: Construct an original argument supported by primary and secondary sources. (Mapped to: final project)
Public-facing communication: Translate academic analysis into a format accessible to a non-specialist audience. (Mapped to: podcast or digital exhibit option)

If your program requires outcomes phrased for accreditation review, keep the verb concrete (analyze, compare, apply, construct) and avoid vague verbs like “understand” or “appreciate,” which are difficult to measure against a rubric.

How Should You Grade a Caribbean Literature Course?

The assessment mix matters as much as the reading list. A course that grades only on exams rewards memorization over the interpretive skill the material actually demands. Here’s a distribution that balances low-stakes and high-stakes work:

Sample assignment prompts:

Close reading essay: Choose one poem by Walcott or Cliff. Analyze how a single formal choice (line break, tense shift, repetition) shapes the poem’s argument about memory or displacement. 3 to 4 pages.
Comparative essay: Compare how Kincaid and Fanon each theorize the psychological cost of colonization, one through memoir/polemic, the other through clinical and philosophical prose. 5 to 6 pages.
Digital public-facing project: Produce a 10-15 minute podcast episode analyzing one text through a Caribbean theoretical lens, aimed at a general audience. This format follows the model used in Baruch/CUNY’s survey course, where a podcast served as the culminating project in place of a traditional final exam.
Group presentation: Teams of three or four apply one theoretical concept (creolization, the paracritical hinge, carnivalesque subversion) to a text of their choosing, presenting for 12 to 15 minutes with a one-page handout.

For grading across multilingual student writing, build your rubric around argument clarity and evidentiary support first, then address grammar and mechanics as a separate, smaller rubric line. This keeps you from penalizing students whose first language isn’t English for the same errors you’d flag in a native speaker’s paper, while still holding everyone to the same standard for argument quality.

Low-cost alternatives for classes with access constraints: swap the podcast option for a written op-ed of equivalent length, and replace group presentations with a shorter individual oral response recorded on a phone, since not every student has access to editing software or a quiet recording space.

Setting Policies That Support a Diverse Classroom

Caribbean literature courses draw a genuinely mixed student body: heritage speakers, international students, and students encountering the region for the first time. Your policies should reflect that mix rather than assume a single kind of student walked in on day one.

Copy-ready policy language:

Attendance: Two unexcused absences permitted per semester; students should notify the instructor in advance when possible.
Accessibility statement: Students with documented accommodations should contact the instructor within the first two weeks; all video and audio materials are captioned or transcribed on request.
Office hours: [Day/time], [location or video link], and by appointment.
Late work: 48-hour grace period with a one-third letter grade penalty per day beyond that window.
Academic integrity: Standard institutional policy; AI-generated text submitted without disclosure is treated as an integrity violation.

Inclusive pedagogy notes worth building into your course from day one: let performative and oral assignments count toward the participation grade, not just attendance. A student who delivers a strong oral reading of a Walcott poem is demonstrating the same close-reading skill as a student who writes a strong paragraph about it. Offer at least one assessment format beyond the traditional essay, whether that’s the podcast option or a visual/mapping project, since Caribbean literature’s own oral and performative traditions make a text-only assessment model incomplete, a point echoed in scholarship on interdisciplinary approaches to Caribbean literary studies.

Accessibility checklist: caption every video, provide scanned readings as searchable text rather than image PDFs, and confirm library reserves are set up before week one so no student is locked out of a reading by cost.

Pro Tip: When grading multilingual student writing, note code-switching and Caribbean English forms as a stylistic choice worth discussing in class rather than an error to circle in red. It turns a grading moment into a teaching moment about the same linguistic power dynamics the syllabus already covers.

Building Full Assignments and a Reusable Rubric

Two full prompts, ready to adapt, plus a rubric skeleton you can reuse across the semester.

Short essay prompt (Week 5): Choose one Walcott poem and one Kincaid passage from A Small Place. In 3 to 4 pages, analyze how each writer uses direct address (to a reader, to a “you”) to implicate an audience in a specific political argument. Learning objectives assessed: close reading, contextual analysis.

Final project prompt (Week 15): Individually or in a pair, produce either a 10 to 15 page research essay or a 10 to 15 minute podcast episode. Apply one Caribbean theoretical concept (creolization, detour, the paracritical hinge) to a primary text from the syllabus. Milestones: proposal due week 10, midterm check-in due week 12, final product due week 15. Scaffolding the project into three checkpoints keeps it manageable for students without archive or fieldwork access, a structure adapted from project design used in the Rutgers syllabus.

One-page rubric outline:

Thesis/argument (25%): Original, specific, arguable claim.
Evidence/close reading (25%): Textual evidence integrated, not just cited.
Context/theory (25%): Accurate, purposeful use of historical or theoretical framework.
Organization (15%): Logical progression, clear transitions.
Citation/formatting (10%): Consistent citation style, correct format for submission type.

Use this same rubric skeleton for peer review sessions before the final project is due. Students reviewing a classmate’s proposal against the same five categories internalize the grading standard faster than they would from written feedback alone.

Curating Contemporary Voices Alongside the Canon

Canonical texts anchor a Caribbean literature syllabus, but a course that stops at Kincaid, Walcott, and Fanon risks implying the tradition ended decades ago. Contemporary fiction from an independent press focused specifically on Caribbean and diaspora storytelling fills that gap without diluting the theoretical rigor of the course.

Maroon House Press publishes fiction rooted in memory, folklore, migration, and cultural survival, the same thematic terrain the canonical weeks already cover. A folklore-inspired novel from the catalog pairs naturally with the Llanos-Figueroa unit; a diaspora-focused title extends the migration theme students first encounter in Kincaid.

Pro Tip: Assign a Maroon House Press title in the same week as a canonical text on a shared theme, migration or ancestral memory work well, and ask students to write a one-page comparison. It teaches continuity across a century of Caribbean writing instead of treating the contemporary text as an afterthought.

For permissions and desk copies, contact the publisher directly. Where budget is tight, assign a single chapter or short story excerpt through library reserves rather than requiring full purchase, and reserve the full text as a recommended, not required, read.

Instructor’s note: what actually works in the room

The biggest mistake instructors make is treating theory weeks as optional. Students read Glissant and Mackey more seriously when those frameworks show up early, attached to a text they’ve already read, not bundled into a single dense week near the end. A ten-minute oral history exercise, where students interview a family member about migration and bring a two-minute clip to class, does more for engagement than another discussion post ever will. It also makes the Cliff and Llanos-Figueroa units land harder, because students arrive with their own version of the material already in hand.

Using Maroon House Press titles in your course

If you’re building out the contemporary tier of your reading list, Maroon House Press is worth a direct look. The catalog runs across literary fiction, folklore-inspired storytelling, and nonfiction on memory and migration, which covers several modules in this syllabus without forcing you to hunt across a dozen different publishers for texts that actually speak to each other. A memory-and-migration module pairs naturally with a folklore-inspired novel; a gender-focused week finds a home in the press’s fiction centered on women’s interior lives.

Instructors building a syllabus around historically rooted Caribbean storytelling can browse the literary fiction catalog for titles suited to a semester-length course, or check the Caribbean fiction landing page for titles organized by theme. Reach out about desk copies before finalizing your order, and check library availability first if your program has a tight materials budget.

Where This Syllabus Template Comes From

This template draws on several published university syllabi rather than a single model, and you should treat all of them as starting points to adapt, not documents to copy verbatim.

The Rutgers SAS-Newark syllabus supplied the 15-week structure and assessment weighting model.
The Rivera syllabus, also at Rutgers, informed the cross-linguistic course description and weekly pairing of long and short texts.
The SSA Caribbean Literature and Culture syllabus shaped the learning outcomes and the interdisciplinary emphasis on film, music, and oral tradition.
The Baruch/CUNY survey syllabus contributed the podcast-as-final-project model.
For deeper theoretical grounding, consult the scholarship on Caribbean literary studies as an interdisciplinary field and on Caribbean-specific literary theory.

If you adapt substantial language or structure from any of these, credit the original syllabus in your own course materials.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is typically covered in a Caribbean literature syllabus?
A Caribbean literature syllabus usually spans Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone texts along with diasporic writing, organized around themes like colonialism, migration, gender, and cultural memory across a 15-week, 3-credit structure.

How many books should a Caribbean literature course require?
Most semester-length courses assign four to six full-length or substantial texts, supplemented with shorter poems, essays, and multimedia excerpts to keep the weekly reading load manageable.

What theoretical frameworks should students learn alongside the texts?
Beyond general postcolonial theory, courses benefit from Caribbean-specific frameworks like Édouard Glissant’s creolization and detour and Nathaniel Mackey’s paracritical hinge, which let students read regional aesthetics on their own terms rather than through a purely Western lens.

Can a Caribbean literature syllabus include contemporary authors alongside classic texts?
Yes, and it should. Pairing canonical writers like Kincaid, Walcott, and Fanon with contemporary voices, including titles from independent presses like Maroon House Press, shows students that the tradition is ongoing rather than historical.

What’s a good final project for a Caribbean literature course?
A scaffolded research essay or a public-facing podcast episode both work well, especially when broken into a proposal, a midterm check-in, and a final deliverable so students with limited research access aren’t disadvantaged.

Sources

Every strong Caribbean literature course reading list has a core tier and a supplementary tier. The core tier should not move much from semester to semester. The supplementary tier is where you rotate in contemporary and underrepresented voices to keep the course current.

Core (required) texts:

Recommended and supplementary texts:

Check your library’s reserve system before ordering. Kincaid and Walcott are almost always in print and affordable; older Francophone and Hispanophone texts in translation sometimes require library reserves or scanned excerpts, which also keeps per-student cost down, a strategy the Rutgers syllabus leans on heavily.

Pro Tip: Pair a long-form novel like Daughters of the Stone with a 20-minute documentary or a single reggae/bomba track from the same period. It cuts per-student reading cost, and it gives visual and auditory learners a second entry point into material that’s otherwise text-heavy.