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Professor: Alejandro de la Fuente. This course explores how African cultural expressions influenced colonial societies and later national cultures in Latin America. How did peoples of African descent shape the formation of Latin American national cultures in areas such as literature, religion, visual arts, music, dance, and cinema? Some scholars have debated whether African religious, musical, medical and communitarian practices were reproduced in the New World or whether they were creolized through fusion with other (European and indigenous) practices. Others have sought to explain how African cultural practices (music, religion, dances) that were derided as primitive and uncivilized in the early twentieth century became "nationalized" and transformed into key expressions of national cultures in many Latin American countries. What are the implications of this process for those cultural forms and their practitioners? How do they impact, if at all, other areas of social life? We explore these questions through historical and literary texts, films, visual arts, and recordings.
