AMER0027: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
Module convenor: Professor Paulo Drinot
MODULE RUNNING 2025/26: please email ia-programmes@ucl.ac.uk if interested in enrolling.
Outline:
This module examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of ‘indigenista’ ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialized social policies. More generally, the module considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This module is assessed by one x 3,000-word essay
Introductory reading:
- Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004.
- Appelbaum, Nancy P., Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds.). Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
- Canessa, Andrew (ed.), Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity and the State in the Andes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005.
- Gotkowitz, Laura (ed.). Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
- Graham, Richard, (ed.). The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
- Kicza, John ed.), The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience and Acculturation. Second edition. Wilmington DE: SR Books, 1999.
- Peloso, Vincent C., Race and Ethnicity in Latin American History. New York: Routledge, 2014.
- Stepan, Nancy. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
- Von Vacano, Diego, The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Wade, Peter, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Second edition. London: Pluto, 2010.
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