This course examines the dynamics of identity construction by and about black subjects in colonial Spanish America and its intrinsic relations to issues of race, gender, sexuality, spatiality, food and ecology. We will explore the racial politics of Church and State and the evolution of racial ideologies as seen through legal documents, chronicles, piracy accounts, religious literature, poetry, newspapers, and visual documents. The course focuses on how black bodies were categorized and constructed within specific political and cultural contexts by colonial authorities and other intellectual sectors of the population, such as creoles and mestizo writers. On the other hand, we also study how these black subjects destabilized and contested the colonial order in their search for freedom, power, and agency. Works to be studied date from the early 16th century to the 19th century.

T 2:00-4:50 pm; 1066 Lincoln Hall

CRN: 47868

Instructor: Mariselle Meléndez