The African Diaspora in Latin America

Catalog description

Examines a wide range of issues regarding race and ethnicity in Latin America. We will begin by exploring the profound impact of Africans in the broadly-defined Latin American region during the last five hundred years. By focusing on the lives of free and enslaved people in the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina, this class reveals the varied and diverse experiences of African descent people living in the broader African Diaspora. This course is not an exhaustive study of slavery, however. We will also study how race and ethnicity have taken on special meanings in Latin America, and students will learn about how race, and specifically, blackness, has been manifested in different parts of contemporary Latin America.