HIST 208: Decolonizing Colonial Latin American and Caribbean History (HC)

Africans to Spanish Americaexpands the diaspora framework to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and dis-junctures between colonial Latin America and the African diaspora in the Spanish empires. Analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. The volume is arranged around three sub-themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion.

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honour. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in,Colonial Blacknesspresents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.

Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as "creoles" who moved from the Old World to the New World, this collection of eighteen original essays investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race. Iberian settlers, African slaves, and Native Americans identified as members of various communities.

Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies,Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City"highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the "lettered city" as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society.

Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World

Spaniards in the Colonial Empire traces the privileges, prejudices, and conflicts between American-born and European-born Spaniards, within the Spanish colonies in the Americas from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Covers three centuries of Spanish colonial power, beginning in the sixteenth century. Explores social tension between creole and peninsular factions, connecting this friction with later colonial bids for independence. Draws on recent research by Spanish and Spanish-American historians as well as Anglophone scholars. Includes some coverage of Brazil and British colonies