LACS 30.17 Brazil: History, Power, and Narrative
This course examines the history of Brazil from Portuguese contact with Indigenous peoples to the present. Our course will trace the major social, political, cultural, and economic questions that have characterized Brazil’s turbulent history with attention to their hemispheric, trans-Atlantic, and global contexts. Across these frames of reference, we will think especially deeply and critically about how everyday and subaltern actors have negotiated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in a country marked by persistent inequality. To that end, our course will reflect upon one of the primary problematics of Brazilian history—the pervasive fragmentation and frequent destruction of historical archives of diverse kinds—and the ways in which this has shaped historical narratives.