Race, Ethnicity and Identity in Atlantic World

This seminar examines the meaning of racial and ethnic identity in colonial Latin America. Our primary approach will be historiographical; we will begin with colonial concepts of racial hierarchy, then move on to national ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo, the emergence of "race mixture" as a scholarly topic, the "caste vs. class" debate of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally recent works on the African diaspora.