Latin American History, 1800-Present

Catalog description

This seminar gives students an overview of central literatures and debates in the historiography of Latin America (the writing of Latin American history) and the Americas more broadly, from approximately to 1800 to the present. Its framing reflects the chronology of mainland Spanish American Independence, but it reaches backwards and outwards as needed. It looks to prior Andean and Haitian bids for self-determination and subsequent exports and imports - of empire, capital, people commodities, science, and instruments of terror - to and from the United States and Africa. It connects those nodes by tracing continuities in political, social, and environmental relationships, and by identifying the ways that peoples in the region (in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, Colombia and the Andes, Brazil and the Southern Cone) have thought and acted their way out of colonialisms. Chief among the seminar's goals is the preparation of graduate students to teach post-1800 Latin American History to undergraduates. Students will develop a grasp of the field's key historiographical developments, and think about new ways to teach a subject that many - but not all - North American undergraduates meet with stereotypes. Graduate students of other historical geographies and from other disciplines are welcome too, given that it is also designed to survey approaches to thinking historically after 1800, to question assumptions that those methodologies make, and to address the politics of researching and writing a post-colonial history of a place that has always been "modern," where "Latin America" came into being as a means of anticipating questions crucial to past and present imperialisms, global histories, and politics