Special Topics in the Humanities (370-6-40)
Topic
Making Race in the Renaissance
Overview of class
This course will consider how and why Whiteness as a racialized construct became correlated with humanity in the late medieval and early modern period within the region known as at the Atlantic, encompassing Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In an increasingly migratory world, medieval concepts of climate-based race were proven false, giving rise to several chaotic centuries in search of a new explanation for visible human difference. As the transatlantic slave trade became a source of wealth for colonizing Europeans, the need to classify people into discrete groups intensified, leading to an array of artworks that used their materiality as an agent of racialization. We will concentrate on the construction of Whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity as co-constitutive forms, while using creative methods to consider the perspectives of Indigenous and African diasporic peoples often lost to the colonial archive. We will engage with scholars of critical race theory, Indigenous studies, and decolonial thought as we interrogate themes such as: the Black/White binary and printmaking; monsters and cannibals in cartography; color in Indigenous codices; African sculptures of Portuguese colonizers; Black/Brownface in theater; and more.
Class Materials (Required)
No textbook required.
Class Attributes
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area