Module description
The focus of the module is on the cross-cultural exchanges involving Africans and Native Americans in the era of colonization and the formation of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. The module proposes to challenge many preconceptions about both American and African history by showing how from the very earliest periods there were exchanges of ideas, cultural beliefs, and rituals, and how the cultures of the Iberian Atlantic have always been hybrid. The cultures of Lusophone Africa and many indigenous peoples from the Americas have always been interwoven, and borrowed from African influences as strongly as from those from other parts of the world. This course illustrates how this has worked in countries as diverse as Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala and Mexico.
Assessment details
- Essay plan (10%)
- Annotated bibliography (15%)
- Oral presentation (15%)
- 3000 words essay (60%)
Educational aims & objectives
The module examines the diverse contexts of cultural formation in the Americas, in particular developing an understanding of the crucial role played by Indigenous Americans and diasporic Africans in this process and the cultural interactions this produced. The module will focus on the cross-cultural pathways which transformed societies in the Americas both inside and outside the aegis of the Global Iberian worlds.
In particular, the module aims to:
i) Introduce students to the histories of cultural resistance and autonomy of both Indigenous Americans and diasporic Africans, and their central role in the formation of societies in the Americas;
ii) Critically analyse the theoretical frameworks through which these events are analysed, such as “hybridity”, “creolisation”, and “entanglement”.
iii) Examine the centrality of different cultural productions in the light of these histories, including but not limited to religious practice, foods, music, dance, and art.
iv) Evaluate the complex of political, social, cultural, economic factors and relationships that structured these interactions.
v) Consider the question of how different cultural productions can be evaluated as historical evidence, and the relationship of this to the transformation of language.
vi) Introduce students to practices of comparative reading and method of cross-cultural analysis.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module, students should have:
- a diverse understanding of the range of cross-cultural connections linking African and American histories; a solid grasp of the political, culinary, ritual and musical cross-cultural connections linking Indigenous Americans and diasporic Africans during the colonial era;
- the ability to critically assess claims made about the legacy of African migration to the New World, and to understand the place of these claims within the broader historiography of Iberian colonial enterprises;
- the capacity to close read cross-cultural texts created during the period of Iberian imperial expansion
- the ability to compare object in multiple media: text, image and their dialogue with material culture
- an appreciation of the composite nature of the modernization process in world history.
Teaching pattern
2-hours per week
Suggested reading list
Core texts
- Boone, Elizabeth Hill, and Walter D. Mignolo, eds. Writing without words: Alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Duke University Press, 2020.
- Gómez, Pablo F. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
- Ireton, Chloe, Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
- Llerena, Laura León. Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes. University of Arizona Press, 2023.
- Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Rappaport, Joanne, and Tom Cummins. Beyond the lettered city: Indigenous literacies in the Andes. Duke University Press, 2012.
- Magaloni-Kerpel, Diana. Images of the beginning: The painted story of the Conquest of Mexico in Book XII of the “Florentine Codex”. Yale University, 2004.
- Wheat, David, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
- Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. By Keber, Eloise Quiñones. Illustrations by Besson, Michel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995