Dr Tanya Harmer SAR M.11

This course is available on the BA in History, BSc in Government and History, BSc in International Relations and History and BSc in Politics and History. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

HY239 is designed to provide students with an introduction to the history of Latin America from the late nineteenth century 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 Cuba’s War of Independence; the Mexican Revolution; migration and workers’ movements; the Guatemalan Revolution and the US-sponsored 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz’s government; the Cuban Revolution; the Catholic Church and Liberation Theology; Allende’s Chile and the 1973 Chilean coup; 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 LGBTQ+ 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.

Lectures will be online. The School aims to run in-person seminars, subject to circumstances, with some online provision if and where necessary.

There will be a reading week in the Michaelmas and the Lent Terms.

Students will be required to do two presentations, 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:

• Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (eds), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America;

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

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

• Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962;

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

• Drinot (ed), Che’s Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America;

• Guillermoprieto, The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now;

• Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History;

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

• Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present

• Moya, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History;

• Pensando, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture in the Long Sixties

• Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960

• 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.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.