As I mentioned in class, this week we’ll read these three articles:

1. Rebecca Earle, ““If you eat their food…Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America”American Historical Review, June, 2010, 688-713.
2.  Kevin Dawson, “The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots” (Chapter 8) from Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs, James Sidbury, eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) online via UBC library website.
3. Jace Weaver “The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3

You might want to take an active reading strategy to get through these, meaning that it will be important to focus on the main arguments and try not to get hung up on the details. It helps to ask yourself questions as you are reading:

How is this argument structured? What is the author arguing against? Can I summarize this in three main points? Choose one or two examples to know well, and trust yourself to extract the meat of the article.

More specifically, think about how these articles engage Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, and what they tell us about histories of race in the colonial period (and depending on whose colonialism). What are the spaces, objects, ideas these authors are working with? What kind of sources are they building their arguments with? Check out the footnotes! Really. Check out the footnotes.

If you are choosing to do a blog post this week, write it here.

and REMEMBER:

I’ve divided you up into two groups for our Tuesday discussions:

If your last name is between Martin-Zhao, please come at 9:30

If your last name is between Castillo-Lun, please come at 10:10.

that will give us 40 minutes of discussion for each group. We’ll switch in the middle of term, just to keep it fair..

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