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The Americas: Comparative Identities in the New World

First year seminar
Fall 2006
Professor Elise Bartosik-Velez

[bartosie@dickinson.edu]


What does it mean to be American?  Inhabitants of the Americas, both North and South, have pondered this question in different languages and from different cultural perspectives for centuries.  This course explores diverse ways in which Americans have defined themselves and have been defined by others from the colonial period to the present.  Two of the primary questions we will be asking are how people of the New World considered themselves to be distinct from the Old World and how these considerations of exceptionality differed and/or coincided in the U.S. and Latin America.  In addition to analyzing the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar, who proposed what are often considered founding statements of American identity, students will also study alternative constructions of identity found in slave narratives, art, and film.