Blood, both as subject and method, provides highly productive opportunities for reading the Caribbean. Blood, bloodlines, bloodshed, and bloodwork are indispensable as conceptual conduits through which to explore the complex histories and intricate cultural processes which constitute the Caribbean. Working with blood as the principal investigate strategy, this course will examine the pivotal role that questions of genealogy and violence occupy in the literatures of the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. We will also study Caribbean literary responses to imperialist medical discourses and colonialist approaches to epidemiology which located the Caribbean of the nineteenth century as a pernicious site of disease, a locus of bad blood. Reading the Caribbean through blood invites comparative reflection on other societies within the global south whose literatures bear witness to similar histories of cultural or political violence. Additionally, this method facilitates reading connections between wider experiences of conflict and the restorative potential of cultural production. The course will focus on specific Caribbean histories, but it will also engage with a wide range of related fields such as memory studies, peace studies, trauma studies and the medical humanities. Alongside the main literary texts, we will read essays by scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Hannah Arednt and Hortense Spillers. Key texts to be studied include Abeng, (Michelle Cliff), Sweet Diamond Dust (Roasario Ferré), The Book of Night Women (Marlon James), The Drifting of Spirits (Gisèle Pineau), Love, Anger, Madness (Marie Vieux-Chauvet) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde) [trans. by Helen Lane].