Racialized modes of seeing, imagining, mapping, and living space played a fundamental role in forging Latin American nation-states throughout the 19th Century. With renewed waves of land enclosure, massive displacement of indigenous peoples, and the numerous nation-led projects to promote European settlements, racial geographies were formed out of the remnants of the colonial order that tied Latin America to the global restructuring of the capitalist system. In this graduate seminar, we will explore how different forms of written and visual culture functioned as tools for the contested production and inscription of these racial geographies. The comparative framework of the course will allow us to attend to concrete local and national contexts while also tracing broader hemispheric trends.

Primary sources will include novels, poetry, political essays, legal codes, maps, and other forms of visual media. Secondary reading materials will include scholarly texts and critical theory on racialization and the production of space.