HIS 118 CC: LATIN AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS

Between 1450 and 1825, Latin America emerged from the pre-colonial and colonial times as a complex product of Amerindian, African, European, and Asian cultures. This course explores this foundational time in the development of Latin America and examines the ways in which diverse cultures clashed, collaborated and combined.  Students will work with film, fiction, documentaries, ethnography, music, art, original texts and records, and modern scholarship as we consider the various ways that stories told about Latin America and the Caribbean both silence some experiences and give voice to others.  How did a historical moment—such as the independence wars against colonialism from 1780 to 1825—shape plays, poems, and heroic chronicles and at the same time be shaped by them?  How have artists, works of art, and architecture both represented power and critiqued it?  How can the study of Latin America and the Caribbean help us to understand how power, race, class, and gender operate? The course will consider these and other questions as we investigate the ways in which different understandings of Latin America’s past inform our world today.