Race in the Americas (HIST30059)

The understanding of race in the Americas – from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – has been a crucial, though shifting, line of division in all American societies since the sixteenth century. To capture that breadth, Race in the Americas begins and ends in the present, but circles back to survey the history of race in the United States and Latin America over four centuries. The history of Afro-descended peoples in the Americas, especially the US and Brazil, and the aftermath of slavery (including the eras of legal segregation, civil rights era and beyond in the US) form a central strand in the subject, both because of its own importance and because the Black experience has often affected how other racial minorities have been understood and treated in the United States and Latin America. We will also study Native American and indigenous history throughout the settler colonial region, from the treaty-making frontier to the era of assimilation and into the present. Similarly, the subject will consider the experiences of people of Asian descent living in the Western Hemisphere. The history of whiteness in a variety of American nations, including the history of the procession of immigrant groups seeking assimilation into the category of “White” as well as more recent turns toward racial extremism, will also be a major theme. The subject concludes with reflections on how changing demographics throughout the region, but particularly in the United States, have been celebrated and criticised in the first decades of the 21st century.