Colonization in Eye-Witness Accounts (ca. 1500-1800)

Colonization in Eye-Witness Accounts (ca. 1500-1800) is a crosslisted Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies/Social Science course taught by Jutta Sperling.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
As soon as Western conquistadores, missionaries, and explorers set foot in Africa, Asia, and the New World, they started to write about their experiences. In this course, we will critically examine how Europeans wrote about American ?noble savages;? justified the enslavement of Africans; and wrote about South Asians through the lens of pre-conceived knowledge. We will discuss sixteenth-century protests against the Spanish genocide of Central and South Americans, seventeenth-century missionary reports from India and China, and eighteenth-century ?scientific? explorations of African cultures, in addition to texts written by Inca scholars, ex-slaves, and ?native? saints. This course will also introduce students to select examples of post-colonial scholarship.

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing