Race and Nation in Modern Latin America

This course grapples with changing understandings of race in Latin America from the early 19th century to the present, and explores the persistent tension between nation-building projects and the region's remarkable human diversity. Latin America's history, like that of the US, has been profoundly shaped by the violent legacies of conquest and slavery. Yet the categories through which Latin Americans imagine racial difference have tended to shift over time and with them, the forms taken by racism and discrimination. We will set these evolving concepts in their historical context, the better to understand their concrete and enduring effects.