HIS 559SEM - Colon Latin America Core

This seminar concentrates on the formation and transformation of racial, ethnic, and gender relations and identities in colonial Latin America and the wider Iberian Atlantic world. Examining the historical literature on Spanish and Portuguese America between 1492 and the early nineteenth century, students will consider how historians have posed and answered questions concerning the legacy of contact, conflict, and cooperation among men and women of indigenous, European, and African origin. How did native peoples define themselves in the face of European conquest? How did Europeans view the original inhabitants of the New World? How did transplanted African cultures, disrupted by slavery, persist or assume new forms in the Americas? How did women navigate restrictions placed on their conduct by a patriarchal church and secular society? To what extent did colonists develop new American identities incompatible with European colonial control? By delving into scholarship concerning these and other themes, students will probe how historians have made sense of Latin America’s colonial period and its role in shaping the vast region that now comprises the southwestern U.S., the Caribbean basin, Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Credits: 3