Chronicles and Capitalism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will examine discursive and visual collections—chronicles, correspondence, questionnaires, codices, surveys, and maps—that imperial subjects created in Spain and Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will explore how Amerindian and European creators gathered, depicted, and described the American continent's plants, animals, minerals, and humans. We will also consider the relationship between these cultural products and the production of knowledge and value in the colony: by categorizing objects in terms of their potential utility to the Crown and its settlers, Spanish chroniclers engage in a kind of primitive accumulation, divorcing American beings from Amerindian modes of producing knowledge and instead reconfiguring them as resources for Spanish global expansion.