Dr Tanya Harmer SAR M.11

This course is available to General Course ‘Spring Semester’ students.

HY239 is designed to provide students with an introduction to the history of Latin America from the 1970s to the present day. Its focus is predominantly on Latin Americans and what happened within the region. However, the course will also explore Latin Americans’ interaction with the wider world, including their pivotal and expanding relationship with the United States during the twentieth century. Major themes covered on the course include identity, citizenship and nationalism; neo-colonialism and anti-imperialism; state-building and concepts of “development”; revolution and resistance; dictatorship and violence; democratization and the struggle for social justice. Among more specific topics covered in lectures and seminars are military dictatorship and anticommunism in the Southern Cone; solidarity networks and Human Rights; Central American revolutionary movements and conflict; democratization and peace; transitional justice and memory wars; the rise and fall of Latin America’s Pink Tide; neoliberalism; and the struggle for indigenous and LGBT rights. In addressing these themes and topics, we will be paying particular attention to histories of race, class and gender with students encouraged to consider how different Latin Americans experienced and influenced the course of history in the region.

Students will engage with workshop content through recorded lectures and podcasts and externally sourced content.

Students will engage with seminar content in a variety of ways, including live sessions, small group meetings, asynchronous Moodle posts, and short presentations.

There will be a reading week in the Lent Term.

Students will be required to write one 2,000-word essay and one 1,000-1,500-word book review, and to contribute to weekly Moodle discussion forums. These assignments will not form part of the final assessment but they are a required component of the course, and students must complete them in order to be admitted to the course examination.

A detailed course outline and reading list, subdivided by weekly topics, will be provided at the first lecture and will also be available on Moodle and in the departmental public folders. However, the following works are useful introductions for the course:

Brown, From Frontiers to Football: An Alternative History of Latin America since 1800;

Burgos-Debray, (ed.), I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala;

Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America;

Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents;

Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics;

Meade, A History of Modern Latin America;

Moya, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History;

Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America;

Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America

Essay (25%, 3000 words) in the LT.
Take-home assessment (75%) in the ST.