HIS 355 - Afro-Latin American Invisibility and Centrality (3)

Despite the large presence of African descended people throughout the region of Latin America, little scholarship focused on this significant population until the twenty-first century. This course examines the historical and narrative process by which a white minority population rendered majority Afro-descended populations in Latin America invisible. Beginning with an overview of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth through the nineteenth-centuries, the course then turns to the Haitian Revolution to examine how racial and social hierarchies shaped historical archives and thus historical narratives. The class will take a closer look at how historians have come to understand the realities of slavery as well as Black-Native relations in colonial Latin America. We will then analyze the constructions of national identities based on the similar myth of mestizaje (racial mixing) in a comparative lens, focusing on the myth of “racial democracy” in Brazil, and Afro-Latin American invisibility in Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina. Through a variety of recent scholarship on the topic as well as primary source materials, students will gain an understanding of the legacies of anti-Black racism in Latin America and how historians have overcome these challenges to assert the centrality of Afro-Latin American populations in shaping the region’s cultures and histories. Same as ANT 355.