What does it mean to create a new ‘home away from home’? This course explores the context of Caribbean migration focusing on the complex history and lived experiences of immigrants from places like Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and others who settle in urban areas in the United States and other national settings. Our exploration of the political, social, and economic issues that these immigrants encounter and their efforts to create a new home, will be enhanced by using problem-based and place-based approaches as well as qualitative and quantitative analyses. Towards that end, we will embark on an interdisciplinary adventure while discussing a myriad of key concepts such as assimilation, culture, identity, diaspora, ‘crimmigration’ and transnationalism.

As producers of knowledge with a particular focus on social (in)justice, racial, gendered and transnational journeys, Guttman Community College scholar-activists have constructed a new digital canon that offers New Yorkers the opportunity to contribute testimonies of tumultuous times. Curated by Dr. Samuel Finesurrey, Guttman undergraduates Elsy Rosario, Tigida Fadiga, Luz Hidalgo, Phisarys Sidemion, and Sadaf Majeed and digitized by Guttman staff members Joanna Wisniewski, Ivan Mora, and Kristina Jiana Quiles, this collection democratizes the production of knowledge by empowering community college students, largely deriving from immigrant households, to shape the narratives told about their communities and their generation. Organized into five themes, with testimonies gathered in six languages, this archive documents a diverse set of New York experiences. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, this exhibition helps us rethink struggles and movements of the past and present, to unearth the human networks that carry all New Yorkers in difficult times.

" In this course we will read essays, novels, memoirs, and graphic texts, and view documentary and experimental films and videos which explore race from the standpoint of the multiracial. Examining the varied work of multiracial authors and filmmakers such as Danzy Senna, Ruth Ozeki, Kip Fulbeck, James McBride and others, we will focus not on how multiracial people are seen or imagined by the dominant culture, but instead on how they represent themselves. How do these authors approach issues of family, community, nation, language and history? What can their work tell us about the complex interconnections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship? Is there a relationship between their experiences of multiraciality and a willingness to experiment with form and genre? In addressing these and other questions, we will endeavor to think and write more critically and creatively about race as a social category and a lived experience."