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The student
- understands the crucial importance of race in the creation of the Atlantic world.
- understands the differences in the ways that whiteness, blackness and redness were constructed and the political reasons thereof.
- understands the centrality of contact, exchange and hybridity in the Atlantic world.
- develops an understanding of the ways in which Black Studies and Native Studies can successfully be brought together.
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Through various case studies, this course examines the crucial importance of race in the creation of the Atlantic World and Atlantic world history. In particular, we will study the differences in the ways that Africans on the one hand, and indigenous peoples on the other hand, were constructed and represented by the colonial powers in relation to constructions of whiteness. We will also consider the impact of these racial constructions on human lives, on political developments, and on the creation of identities. Simultaneously, we will study how these rigid conceptualizations of race and identity ran, and continue to run, counter to the most important reality of the Atlantic world: the mixing of cultures, the mixing of genes, the processes of cultural exchange—hybridity, in other words. Much of the course will explore the types of contact and the processes of exchange that existed between these groups of people, between those caught up in the African diaspora, indigenous peoples and Europeans, not just in the colonial periods, but though the centuries and up to the present day. Finally, this course will explore ways in which Black Studies and Native Studies—fields that are not usually combined—can be brought together to better answer the many questions concerning race, identity, human rights and belonging that the Atlantic world gave birth to.
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