Courses

This interdisciplinary course explores how the socio-economic, cultural, and legal foundations, institutions, and politics of the Latin America were shaped by the legacy of slavery and structural racism. It covers the origin of the political and juridical systems of selected Latin American countries, including Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil, with a focus on how race set the limits of and impeded the exercise of popular citizenship. Adopting an Afro-diasporic perspective, more specifically the idea of “Amefricanidade” (by Lelia Gonzalez), the course will illuminate the political and cultural situation in Latin American and Caribbean countries.

The definition of law used in this course is not limited to understanding law as a “system of rules”. We will work on law as part of the historical dynamics of socioeconomic life and culture in the Latin American countries analyzed. Thus, the course will analyze more specifically how race relations and practices of popular citizenship have shaped legal and extralegal spheres, including ways that cultural production, performance, and embodied practices have reshaped and negotiated Latin America's legal systems.

The course will provide an overview of the relationship between racial issues and the formation of legal institutions in Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, given the strong African presence, black culture, African diasporic religiosity, and the socioeconomic impacts of slavery and structural racism in the social formation of these countries, which can serve as a comparative model for analysis with other countries in Latin America and the Southern United States.

Objectives: Learn to detect and assess the impacts of racialization in legal, political, aesthetic, and social structures across a variety of cultural and national contexts in the Americas. More generally, this class seeks to apply academic theories on race relations and cultural studies since the 1500s to analyzing the economics, politics, and performances of race in shaping social life the Americas.