La América clásica

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course explores the connections that Indigenous, Afro-American, Spanish, and Criolle writers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries draw between American and classical cultures. What do colonial writers gain—and what do they risk—in invoking, adapting, and critiquing the traditions of Greece, Rome, and early Christianity? How are such comparisons utilized in service of epistemological and cosmological expansion, cultural syncretism, legal and theological argumentation, political resistance, and efforts to develop a specifically Spanish-American history and identity? We will examine historical and ethnographical texts, autobiographies, crónicas, and relaciones as well as prose, poetry, and drama.