First Person Pluralities: Indigenous Literatures of Abya Yala

This course introduces students to Indigenous literature, philosophical ideas, currents, and traditions of the Americas (Abya Yala), and key themes in contemporary Native American and Indigenous Studies. Particularly, it focuses on the territories now referred to as Latin America. This course aims to provide students with conceptual tools with which to critically interrogate “settler epistemologies,” which are often understood as “racialized, anthropocentric, and capitalist understandings of places”1 that sustain various forms of Indigenous erasure. We will explore how Indigenous-authored literature, understood in a broad temporal and cultural sense, is inextricably linked to land, kinship, and relationality, and we will further discuss how Indigenous writers and activists are currently using these ideas to resist enduring coloniality while building more ethical futures.