AML 3682 spring 2018 Ribo

In a Q&A accompanying the PBS documentary series Black in Latin America Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remarks, “…there were 11.2 million Africans that we can count who survived the Middle Passage and landed in the New World, and of that 11.2 million, only 450,000 came to the United States… All the rest went south of Miami as it were.” Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people brought against their will from Africa to the Americas landed in the Caribbean and Latin America, Latinx people of African heritage have often been erased not only in mainstream US culture but also in US Latinx communities. As a corrective to this erasure, this course examines the histories, cultures, and literatures of US Afro-Latinx peoples and focuses specifically on connecting the Hispanophone Caribbean and the US South.

Possible readings include:

• The Afro-Latin@ Reader, eds. Juan Flores & Miriam Jiménez Román
• Chango’s Fire, Ernesto Quiñones
• Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, Raquel Cepeda
• Loosing My Espanish, H.G. Carrillo

This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; and Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies. This course also meets the Alterity requirement.