Afro-Hispanic Review (original) (raw)

This course interrogates the problem of Blackness in Latin America. While it is indisputable that Iberian America participated in the transatlantic slave trade, receiving some 90% of all Africans transported in the Middle Passage, locating Black identity amongst their descendants is more challenging. This is because the predominant identitarian notion of Blackness emerged historically in Anglo American contexts, particularly the United States. While idealized notions of White racial purity in the United States catalyzed an all-encompassing Black category as the site of Whiteness’ exclusion, idealizations in discourse and representation of mestizaje in Latin America have worked against the emergence of a strong racial identity in favor of national identity, masking the materiality of the Black presence within these national-cultural formations. Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole. Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.