Not Quite White?: Whiteness in and Across the Americas

Catalog description

Is Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen a woman of color? Does the answer to that question change whether she is in Brazil or in the United States? Why was there a backlash in the Mexican entertainment industry to the stardom of visibly and proudly indigenous actors Yalitza Aparicio (the star of the film Roma) and Tenoch Huerta (Wakanda Forever)? Would a white-presenting person with one Black grandmother be eligible for university admissions through Brazil's socioeconomic and racial quotas? In this seminar style IntroSem, we will explore these questions through an investigation of whiteness and white supremacy in the Americas, with a focus on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Southern Cone, and the US and the Latinx community. Through in-class discussions and collaborative curation projects, we will analyze historical documents, current events, films, and, yes, Twitter debates, to think critically about whiteness in Latin America, how it relates to discourses of racial democracy, and how its ambiguity perpetuates national and regional identities founded on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. You will engage with a wide range of methodological approaches to studying whiteness, including ethnography and psychology, as well as theoretical traditions like Black feminism and decoloniality. Your multidisciplinary final projects will showcase the skills you develop in using historical and cultural analysis as an entry point to examine and compare the different ways in which whiteness works throughout the Americas. Taught in English.