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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Department of History Fall 2014 NOTE THAT FOR FALL 2016 THERE WILL BE SOME CHANGES TO THE READING BUT THE OVERALL STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE WILL BE SIMILAR Literature of the Field: Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (HIST-GA.1201) Sinclair Thomson 53 Washington Square South, 512 Office hours: Tu 2-4 Phone: 992-9626
Class meets: Wed 9:30-12:15 53 Washington Sq. South, Room 701
Colonial history is not only rich and fascinating in itself but fundamental for understanding modern Latin America. This course will explore the historiography of colonial Latin America, including classic works of scholarship, representative studies of major fields, and new literature. We will also reflect on the ways in which the historiography responds to contemporary historical forces and concerns. The course will be necessarily selective, focusing on landmark texts, key fields, and leading debates. It is also consciously limited (both thematically and regionally) in order to complement, rather than overlap with, other courses available in the Latin American and Caribbean history program. Student papers, however, are free to address any of the colonial historiography not covered in the core readings. The papers also provide an opportunity to explore older classic studies as well as literature in Spanish or Portuguese. (See below for course assignments.) The books for the course will be available on reserve at Bobst Library and for purchase at the NYU Bookstore. The articles are available through JSTOR or will be distributed electronically by the instructor. If you would like to do more background reading on colonial Latin American history, you may wish to consult the entries in: Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vols. I-III (1984-85). Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. XI, Bibliographical Essays (1995). R.E.W. Adams and Murdo MacLeod, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. II, part 2 on Mesoamerica (2000).
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Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. III, parts 1-2 on South America (1999). José Moya, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 14501850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). For additional overviews of colonial historiography, see: Benjamin Keen, “Main Currents in United States Writings on Colonial Spanish America, 1884-1984,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65 (4): 657-682, 1985. William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500-1900,” in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (1985), pp. 115-190. John Kicza, “The Social and Ethnic Historiography of Colonial Latin America: The Last Twenty Years,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (3): 453-488, 1988. Steve Stern, “Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies (Suppl.) 24: 1-34, 1992. This article is also found in Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, 2nd edition. Eric Van Young, “The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (2): 211-247, 1999. Sueann Caulfield, “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 81 (3-4): 449-490, 2001.
Week 1 (Sept. 3)
Introduction
Week 2 (Sept. 10)
Conceiving of Colonialism
Ricardo Levene, Las indias no eran colonias (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1951), pp. 9-11, 161-165. J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizajes,’” in Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995). Annick Lemperière, “El paradigma colonial en la historiografía latinoamericanista,” Istor
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(CIDE, Mexico) 19: 107‐128. A prior version was published as “La cuestión colonial” in the electronic journal Nuevo MundoMundos Nuevos 4, 2004. URL: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “La cuestión colonial,” Nuevo MundoMundos Nuevos, Debates, 2005, [Online]. Put online on 08 February 2005. URL: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/441.
Week 3 (Sept. 17)
Conceiving of Conquest
Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest [1982] (2nd ed., Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1993). William Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico [1843] (New York: Modern Library, 1998), pp. 796-819. James Lockhart, “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture,” in Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
Supplementary reading: Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570 [1971] (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977). Steve Stern, “Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies (Suppl.) 24: 1-34, 1992. This article is also found in Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest, 2nd edition. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992).
Week 4 (Sept. 24)
Race and Identity Formation
Note: Statement of paper topic and sources due today María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008). James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2): 181-208, 2011.
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Supplementary reading: Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650,” American Historical Review 104 (1): 33-68, 1999. Rachel O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). See the debate in response to Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra in The William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2), 2011.
Week 5 (Oct. 1)
Religion
Nathan Wachtel, The Faith of Remembrance: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
M (Philadelphia: arrano Labyrinths
Inga Clendinnen, “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Past and Present 94: 27-48, 1982. Supplementary reading: Solange Alberro, Inquisicion y sociedad en Mexico, 1571-1700 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998). Stuart Schwarz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Asunción Lavrín, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008). Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Duke, 2002).
Week 6 (Oct. 8)
Gender
Anne Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Serge Gruzinski, “The Ashes of Desire: Homosexuality in Mid-Seventeenth-Century New Spain” [1986], in Pete Sigal, ed., Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). Supplementary reading: Verena Martínez-Alier (a.k.a. Verena Stolcke), Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society [1974] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2nd ed., 1989).
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Ramón A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Sueann Caulfield, “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 81 (3-4): 449-490, 2001.
Week 7 (Oct. 15)
Frontiers
Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Neil Whitehead, “Black Read as ‘Red’: Ethnic Transgression and Hybridity in Northeastern South America and the Caribbean,” in Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). Supplementary reading: Herbert Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921). Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers. Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850 (Duke University Press, 1997 David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
Week 8 (Oct. 22) Capitalism John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011). Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6 (2): 201-222, 1995. Supplementary reading: Steve Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93: 829-872, 1988. See the rejoinder to Stern by Immanuel Wallerstein and Stern’s reply. Enrique Semo, The History of Capitalism in Mexico: The Origins 1521-1763 [1973] (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1993).
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Carlos Sempat Assadourian et al., Modos de producción en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1989). Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Week 9 (Oct. 29) Slavery and Profit Note: First paper due today (if you are writing two papers this semester) Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery [1944] (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994). Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman, Introduction to B. Solow and S. Engerman, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). Supplementary reading: Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 15501835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997).
Week 10 (Nov. 5) Slavery and Freedom Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117: 40-66, 2012. Supplementary reading: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas [1946] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; 2nd ed., 1963) (New York: Vintage, 1989). Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Week 11 (Nov. 12) Indian Revolution
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Charles Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Sergio Serulnikov, “Disputed Images of Colonialism: Spanish Rule and Indian Subversion in Northern Potosí, 1777-1780,” Hispanic American Historical Review 76 (2): 189-226, 1996. Supplementary reading: John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003). Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Week 12 (Nov. 19) National Independence Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Francois-Xavier Guerra, “Lógicas y ritmos de las revoluciones hispánicas,” en F.X. Guerra, ed., Las revoluciones hispánicas: Independencias americanas y liberalismo español (Madrid: Ed. Complutense, 1995). Supplementary reading: John Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826 [1973] (2nd ed.; New York: Norton, 1986). Francois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992). Manuel Chust, comp., Las independencias iberoamericanas en su laberinto. Controversias, cuestiones, interpretaciones (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2010). Marcela Echeverri, “Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in Southwestern New Granada, 1809–1819,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91 (2): 237-269, 2011.
Week 13 (Nov. 26) No class meeting Students will use this week towards the drafting of their papers, in consultation with instructor.
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Week 14 (Dec. 3) Conclusions Presentations of papers in progress and wrap-up session.
Note: Final paper due on Monday, Dec. 8.
Course Assignments: 1) Class participation: A successful seminar requires everyone’s active effort and involvement. For a heavy reading course, such as this one, students should come to class prepared and ready to share their reflections and reactions to the material. Oral participation in class is important. However, the value of one’s contribution to group discussion does not depend on how much one talks, so much as on other factors that will vary according to the individual student. These might include how openly one engages with others’ ideas; the care or boldness one shows in comments; the ability to identify the key points in the reading or in group reflection, to introduce constructive criticism of the readings, or to advance discussion beyond a sticking point. Students will also turn in a brief (1-2 page) written comment prior to most class meetings. This exercise will give students a chance to organize their thoughts before class and will facilitate discussion. It will also give me more of an idea of individual responses to the material and an added opportunity to follow student thinking throughout the course. You should demonstrate your grasp of the text’s basic argument(s), but focus on your own appraisal of the work. These written comments will not be graded, but they must be turned in as part of the class participation assignment. There will be no written comment for Weeks 1, 13, or 14; plus you may elect to skip four other weeks at your discretion. You are therefore responsible for a total of 7 weekly responses. The comments should be turned in either in hard copy form to my faculty mailbox (7th floor mailroom) or as an email message or attachment to me (
[email protected]). The comments are due the day before class, Tuesdays, by 5:00 p.m. Beginning Week 2, students will lead off each class with individual presentations (10 minutes will suffice). The purpose of this is to lay out the topic and historiography that you are working with for your papers and to launch discussion with a set of comments and questions about the assigned reading. It is recommended that you give the presentation during a week whose literature you will be writing about for your essay. You are expected to comment on a minimum of at least one supplementary text in the oral presentation. 2) Written work: The papers offer an opportunity to explore literature, issues, and regions that we may cover only tangentially or superficially in class. Students working on British colonial experience in the Caribbean, for example, could use their paper to delve into the historiography that interests them. They also allow for an engagement with
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historiography that is not written in English. The papers will normally combine “classics” and more recent studies. There are two options for the written work: A) Students may write two shorter critical essays (10 pp.) in order to explore a wider range of historiographic issues. This option is recommended for history students preparing for qualifying exams. If you choose this option, the first paper would be due October 29. The papers should not be book reviews that simply summarize the reading, but an assessment of the achievements and limitations of the selected works (usually 3-4 books, or their equivalent if you include articles, not including the required reading for the course). B) Students may write one medium-length essay (20 pp.). This more in-depth paper should take on a major problem in colonial history, assess a selection of the secondary literature (approximately 5-8 books, or equivalent, not including the required reading), and engage in independent analysis of the issues. The deadline for the second shorter essay or the medium-length paper is Monday, December 8. Students may arrange to meet with me in order to discuss topics and supplementary reading for the essays and presentations. By Week 4 students should turn in a brief statement of the paper topic and a list of the works to be treated. Grading: Class participation will count for 50% and written work for 50% of the final grade.
