HISP 415 - Cultural Resistance and Survival: Indigenous and African Peoples in Early Spanish America

In the Old World, Spain defined its national identity by locating its “others” in Jews, conversos, Muslims, moriscos, Turks, gypsies, pirates and Protestants. In the New World, Spaniards employed many of the same discursive and legal tactics—along with brute force—to subject Amerindian and African peoples to their will and their cultural norms. But indigenous and African populations in the Americas actively countered colonization. They rejected slavery and cultural imposition through physical rebellion, the use of strategies of cultural preservation and the appropriation of phonetic writing, which they in turn wielded against European hegemony. We will examine a fascinating corpus of indigenous pictographic codexes, architecture, myths, and histories and letters of resistance, along with a rich spectrum of texts in which peoples of African descent affirm their own subjectivity in opposition to slavery and cultural violence. What will emerge for students is a complex, heterogeneous vision of the conquest and early colonization in which non-European voices speak loudly on their own behalf. Prerequisite(s): HISP 307 or permission of instructor. (4 Credits)