Mestizaje Revisited. Racialization, Gender, and Sex in the Latin American Colonial Corpus

Sociocultural formations in Latin America are often explained through the metaphor of mestizaje. This seminar examines written and visual artifacts from the Conquest and the colonial period to unearth and analyze strategies and practices of Spanish and Portuguese colonial domination, occluded by narratives and imaginaries of mestizaje. We will work with critical methods of postcolonial discursive and power analysis related to gender and sexual domination and racialization, with a focus on Iberian colonial racial formations in the New World, and on decolonial perspectives on the function of race and sex/gender in Iberian colonial domination.