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This course provides an introduction to the texts and rhetoric of the movement to abolish slavery in the Caribbean. Our exploration of the literary and discursive patterns that bind the struggle against slavery in this diverse region (including the British West Indies, Cuba, and Haiti) will be guided by several questions. How did the formerly enslaved represent their experiences and level critiques against the slave system? What arguments did abolitionists - black and white, enslaved and free - make against slavery, and how did they imagine emancipation? What techniques do novelists, poets, and other artists use to represent the horrors of slavery and emancipatory struggles? To explore these and other problems, this class focuses on novels, poems, images, films, political treatises and first-person histories produced (mainly) by individuals who had either experienced Caribbean slavery or participated in the network of Transatlantic abolition. These texts to chart a complex journey, from the middle passage and eighteenth-century plantation life to international abolition, resistance to slavery, and the memories of racial slavery. The final section considers how the cultural legacy of Caribbean slavery and antislavery are taken up by artists from the Harlem Renaissance and various anti-colonial movements, and more recently by critics of mass incarceration in the US. Authors include, among others: Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Esteban Montejo, Cirilo Villaverde, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, and Ava DuVernay (all texts will be available in English).