Race and Nation in Modern Latin America

Catalog description

From initial colonial contact, Latin America represents a site of violent conquest by European colonizers over indigenous populations and exploitation of both African and indigenous labor; white control over black and brown bodies was at the very core of colonial economic success or failure. In turn, racial hierarchy and exploitation define both colonial and modern Latin American history. Our focus is not the overall study of race and slavery throughout Latin American history. Instead we will examine the role of race in Latin American nation-building following independence through the age of twentieth century nationalism. As the ideas of scientific racism swept Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, the United States established economic, and at times military, dominance over much of Latin America from the neo-colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Increasingly, as cultural and economic ties were broken with the Iberian empires-even in the case of Spain's last American colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico-Latin American elite sought modernity through trade with and cultural borrowing from the United States and Europe. In response to the scientific racist ideology that in the US led to segregation, Jim Crow, convict lease systems, lynching, and widespread disenfranchisement, Latin American elite consciously engaged these racist ideas as they granted or restricted non-white populations access to their rights as citizens. Nineteenth century luminaries such as Cuban revolutionary José Marti, Argentine journalist and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and even Venezuelan military and political leader Simón Bolívar had introduced radical ideas on race and citizenship. In the first half of the twentieth century Latin American intellectuals famously built on those ideas by embracing, renegotiating, and/or rejecting North American racist ideologies-often all within the same work-as they optimistically and proudly recognized and rehabilitated the place of the nonwhite, indigenous, mestizo, and mulatto populations into their national narratives. We will focus on three of the best known of these authors (Mexican Jose Vasconcelos, Cuban Fernando Ortiz, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre) as well as scholarship that will help us contextualize their works, and allow us to better understand the broader theme of race in modern Latin America. The object here is to consider how the subject of race-in large part defined by the role of Afro-Latin Americans, the indigenous, mestizo, and mulattos-is situated in relation to broader considerations of nation, power, violence, and identity. The goal of the course is to lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary understanding of modern Latin America and the modern black Atlantic: To consider the consequences of colonization, slavery, and the slave trade, both historically and contemporarily, on modern intellectual formations and institutions.