Otherized and Organized: The Politicization of Indigeneity in Colonial Latin America

Catalog description

This course focuses on Indigenous visual, material, and cultural production of early colonial Latin America (Viceroyalty of Peru and Viceroyalty of New Spain) from the mid-1500s through the mid-1700s, with some content on the very late precontact period before colonization. During this period, Indigenous Latin American peoples experienced dramatic changes to their autonomy and lifeways, with implications for their languages, social organization, and relationship to the landscape. The class will review artifacts, texts, and other cultural expressions to bring forward the complexity of cultural clash between various Indigenous and European actors and to sort through how material and cultural value--and changing value--factored into questions of political and social order. Study of cross-cultural shifts incorporates emerging discourses on race, ethnicity, and social justice. In this scope, we will address discourses and debates regarding difference, alterity, the hybrid, the transcultural, etc., and analyze how visual and material culture examples bring forward Indigenous identities as perceived and politicized in relation to questions of self and other, with attention mainly to Indigenous creators and audiences but also their European counterparts. Furthermore, a component of the class will include contemporary artworks that reflect on the reverberations of colonization of the Americas.