AIP 324 Race and Place in Natural Histories of the Americas (CP, REP, UP)
This course takes a cultural-historical approach to tracing the evolution of natural history as practice, science, and genre from the Age of Discovery through the eighteenth century. The natural history genre was a cultural production that embodied European obsessions with humans’ relation to the environment. Through circulated discourses about curiosity, classification, and cultivation (among others), the genre became agent of empire; and yet, early rhetorics of environmentalism and sustainability traveled transatlantically, too. Interwoven into all of these discourses was race. This class will target the Americas as it examines how natural history text and art transformed into a global project of knowledge production, mediating indigenous and African knowledges in ways that entangled race and nature. Students will explore how natural history rooted science itself in racial exploitation. Students will consider the symbolic resonances of colonized land for those who suffered to cultivate it, and for those who resisted bondage through subterfuge, revolt, or marronage.