Settler Colonialisms and Black/Indigenous Resistances throughout Abya Yala (the Americas) and…

Catalog description

Since the popularization of the term Settler Colonialism by Patrick Wolfe (1998, 2006), there has been a rich literature on the topic. However, the majority of literature on settler colonialism has focused mainly on Anglophone countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand; and on occupied Palestine. Further, Black and Black/Indigenous scholars, such as Shanya Cordis (Black/Warau and Lokono; 2019, 2020), have argued that traditional theories of settler colonialism flatten or ignore the histories of Black chattel slavery and the role of the plantation in the Americas. In this course, we will examine how settler colonialisms are theorized and operate. Although we will have a specific focus on the region known as Latin America and the Caribbean, we will also incorporate engagements of settler colonialisms on the African continent and beyond. Through readings and discussions with Black and Indigenous thinkers within and outside of the academic sphere, we will ask: How do nation states, despite the 20th and 21st century recognitions of blackness and indigeneity throughout the hemisphere, continue to reproduce a multitude of violences through the maintenance of territory? How does an examination of settler colonialism and the planationocene together give us alternate understandings of state power? And, how have Black/Indigenous theorists thought to recover and repair from these violences?