ROMST 200.01: Critical Approaches to Mestizaje |
ROMST 200.01: Critical Approaches to Mestizaje
Duke University
Spring 2012
Claudia Milian, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Studies; African & African American Studies
This seminar will examine critical theories of mestizaje, miscegenation, mixed race, and hybridity as articulated in Latino, Latin American, and African-American projects of racial identification and classification. In particular, the course aims to study the theories, rhetoric, and assumptions of racial and cultural inclusion, while analyzing frameworks that propose mestizaje, hybridity, or “mixedness” as oppositional and transgressive concepts that highlight an emancipatory potential. The seminar will investigate the following questions: What does it mean to have hybridity as the foundation of an identity that is most often associated with Latinas and Latinos? In effect, who are the “mestizos?” In what ways does a mestiza consciousness speak to twenty-first century articulations of the increased prominence of mixed race in the United States? What possibilities can mestizaje offer through its multiple locations of cultures and races in both countering purist constructions of racial ideologies and in building alliances with other “contact zones” of mixtures that remain to be discursively mapped in the critical language of mestizaje? The course will draw from wide ranging theoretical, literary, and historical approaches to notions of mixture as a mode of inquiry that charts new identities, social practices, and knowledge production.
Tags: Claudia Milian, Duke University