Across Latin America in the last decades, there has been a surge of works of historical fiction — primarily novels, but also plays films, and telenovelas — that take slavery, racial discrimination, and violence, wars of conquest against indigenous peoples, or inter-racial romances as their subject. Though fictional, these works explicitly engage with contemporary historical debates, often seeking to center marginal historical characters and viewpoints in order to create alternative national histories that promote greater racial inclusion, awareness, or equality. We will focus on two case studies: Argentina and Brazil.

While in Argentina (long regarded as a mainly white and culturally European country), several historians and novelists have sought to rewrite national history to reflect processes of racial mixture and the presence of non-white people, in Brazil, historians and novelists have worked to debunk longstanding visions of society as racially mixed and harmonious, focusing on topics like racism, slavery, activism, and memory. We will examine fictional works alongside historical documents and the writings of historians themselves to try to understand how history and fiction reflect and shape ideas about race in each country, and how these cases compare or differ from one another.

This course counts toward the literature requirement for the Spanish minor.

Class Format:

The course will be taught in English, with readings in English as well as in Spanish and Portuguese (students must be able to read and speak at course level for at least one of these Romance languages; reading knowledge of the other is encouraged, but not required).