Fiction and the Colony

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This class will examine fictional representations (prose, drama, film, etc.) of American-European contact and the early Spanish colony from the 16th through the 21st centuries. We will experiment with two historiographical methods, Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Marisa Fuentes’s “reading along the bias grain,” both of which invite scholars to expand upon limited archival material with a lot of historical data and a little bit of imagination. What can fiction help us to understand about the realities of the colony? Students are invited to collaborate with their classmates to create their own works of historical fiction.