English 203

Book List

Deloria, Phil : Playing Indian; Forbes, Jack D.: Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples; Lockhart, James : Nahuas and Spaniards: Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology; Martinez, María Elena: Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico; Rama, Angel: The Lettered City; Saldana Portillo, Maria Josefina: Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States; Simpson, Audra : Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States; Williams, Robert : The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest

Description

A comparative study of Spanish and British colonialism, this course examines specific forms of governmentality implanted in the Americas and consequences thereof, with particular attention to racialization. British and Spanish modes of colonialism produced distinct racial formations in Hispanophone and Anglophone America, and yet both Mexico and the United States are made up of racially stratified social systems today. Slavery, the encomienda, policies of limpieza de sangre and blood quantum and more are examined as modes of colonial governmentality that organized labor, reproduction, leisure, and space in New England and New Spain. Focusing on the colonial production of what are today indigenous and black/afromestizo identities, we consider how race was accomplished through the disciplining of gender and sexuality, and thus course readings necessarily engage this active entwining of race, gender, and sex. The syllabus includes a mixture of primary archival and literary material, and secondary historical and literary studies of the colonial archives.

This course satisfies the Group 6 (Non-historical) requirement.