3.0

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Average Course Rating

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain was home to a sizeable Black African, Afro-diasporic, and Afro-descendant population that scholarship has only recently begun to acknowledge substantively. The historical legacy of these communities reveals that Afro-Iberians, enslaved as well as free, experienced often violent forms of racial discrimination and oppression, but that they also contributed meaningfully to a shared cultural landscape of art, literature, drama, dance, and music. Early modern writers of fiction likewise depicted Afro-diasporic characters not only as servants but also as sovereigns, soldiers, scholars, and saints. This advanced undergraduate seminar will grapple with these ambivalences by surveying a wide, multidisciplinary range of cultural products. In surveying the historical and literary complexities of the African diaspora in early modern Iberia, we will ask how these communities were subjected to the violence of empire, colonialism, racism, human trafficking, and enslavement, while at the same time generating creative vectors of pride, freedom, agency, and resistance. Class will be conducted in Spanish. (If AS.210.311 has not been taken, the student may submit an SPE score: https://krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/spanish-and-portuguese/undergraduate/get-started/)