Encounters: Travel Narratives and the Origins of Race

This course examines the deep roots of race and racism with reference to the travel narratives that shaped them. The course proceeds in chronological order, with each week devoted to one of the classics of the genre. Our focus in time is the period that came to be known as the Age of Discovery, which lasted from around the middle of the fifteenth century to around the end of the seventeenth century. Our focus in space is the Atlantic world. Particular attention is paid to narratives that describe (or claim to describe) Africa and America and to accounts that were the work of Indigenous American and African authors. Texts include the Travels of Marco Polo, Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. The interests and the contexts that informed the construction and dissemination of these accounts is central objects of inquiry. We examine the extent to which these texts were embedded in histories of enslavement, resistance, and empire, but we also read these texts on their own terms. We work to understand the ideas about the common structure of human life that seem to be embedded in them. We reconstruct their particular conceptions of political life and of the state. And we also consider the complex manner in which travel narratives at once resisted and disrupted and also contributed to the invention of the modern concept of race.