African American Studies
381-0-20: Topics in Transnational Black Culture :

Instructor: John David Marquez
Office address: Kresge 2-320
Phone: 847-467-0503
E-mail: "Dr. John D. Márquez"
Office Hours:

Expected Enrollment: 35

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course generally examines the history, culture, and politics of persons of African descent in Latin America. Latin America is home to the world’s largest percentage of the Black Diaspora, yet Black peoples in Latin America tend to get overlooked in fields such as African American and Black Studies due to language differences and the influence of African American history, culture, and politics. Another reason for this tends to be the legacy of Spanish colonialism and the evolution of a unique racial order throughout most of Latin America, through which Blackness is signified and politicized in ways that scholars of African American studies tend to misunderstand or under-analyze when they view it through an analytical lens that applies more to the U.S.
The course will also include a focus on contemporary Black-Latino relations in the U.S. considering recent demographic shifts associated with neo-liberalism and globalization. The unique racial formation of Latin America has presented unique challenges in this regard considering that so much of the U.S.’s current Black population is also Latino, in an ethnic sense, and so much of its Latino population would be considered Black, in a racial sense, in Latin America yet not to the same extent in the U.S. A focus on these facts calls attention to the problems that often derive from our relative inability to de-link race from ethnicity in similar ways that we’ve been able to de-link race from biology. It also invites scrutiny on the salience of national borders and nationalism in structuring our understanding of racial politics.

[Course Descriptions for Winter 2009] [Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences] [AF_AM_ST African American Studies]