ARTH 398 Special Topics in Art and Society: Colonial Latin America

• Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:45am-2:15pm
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Daniel Santiago Sáenz

In recent decades, following the so-called global turn in art history, scholars have demonstrated an increasing interest in the artistic production of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, a period spanning from Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the continent in 1492 to the wars of independence in the mid-nineteenth century. This course, designed as a thematic survey, introduces students to key aspects of art and architecture in the Iberian Americas, particularly in New Spain (a territory known today as Mexico). Acknowledging the fact that invasion is a structure—both historical and ongoing—and not an event [1], we will examine the complex relationships between artistic production and settler colonialism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America. Moving beyond the misguided assumption that the arts of the so-called ‘New’ World represent little more than an imitation of European ‘originals,’ we will think about the cross-pollination between artistic practices and objects on both sides of the Atlantic. 

We begin our journey with some theoretical and historiographic considerations, followed by an overview of Indigenous arts, including amantecayotl (Nahua feather mosaics) and the work of tlacuiloli (Indigenous painter-scribes), before and after the Fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. We will then examine selected aspects of art and architecture in colonial Latin America, including issues of religion and conversion, gender and sexuality, the representation of race, miraculous images, and the presence of American objects in European collections. Towards the end of the semester, we will briefly examine contemporary engagements with the aesthetics and legacies of settler colonialism in Latin America and beyond.

[1] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006): 388.