HIST 492
Revolutionary Thought in Latin America
Last Offered Spring 2009
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Throughout Latin America revolution has been a focus of political and social thought–as well as political organizing and armed initiatives–since the late eighteenth century and continues to be so, albeit in changed form, today. This course will examine the trajectory of various types of revolutionary theory in Latin America, from the anti-colonial and anti-white thought behind massive Andean uprisings in the 1780s to efforts to win national sovereignty and to construct socialist or other revolutionary states in modern Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and, more recently, to put more racially-, ethnically-, and gender-oriented notions of social justice into place. We will work to measure the impact of revolutionary thought as well as to tease out the internal tensions in the utopian ideals that revolutionaries have implicitly or explicitly pursued. We will also weigh the impact of more strictly intellectual currents and of geopolitical concerns on the evolution of Latin American ideas of revolution. This course will fulfill the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative by comparing and analyzing divergent theorizations of history and society, as well as the contexts in which such theories emerged and to which we might or might not choose to apply them. A central aim of the course will be to compare the formation of revolutionary initiatives across national and chronological boundaries.