Civilization and Barbarism

Catalog description

What does it mean to be civilized? What does it mean to be barbaric? Who decides who is civilized and who is not? Is there an intrinsic relationship between the two? This course studies the way a colonial and racist heritage, which divided the world into 'civilized' and 'savage,' 'European ' and 'cannibal,' was taken up again after colonial independence as a key question for Latin American thinkers concerned with modernization, anticolonialism and dictatorship. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will trace the continuities and transformations of the concepts of civilization and barbarism in diverse local contexts of Latin America up until today.