In this course, we will explore the role that faith and belonging have played in the textual and visual history of North America in the centuries after European travellers started to write about their experiences in what then was called the New World.
- How did people first learn about the Americas in the centuries after European rulers and subjects realized that their sense of the world had been incorrect?
- How did people who had undergone captivity, forced migration, bondage and/or enslavement make sense of their fate; how did they try to find a voice and recover agency?
- How did people theorize the changes they experienced as they moved / were forced to move to new environments?
These are questions we will address in the course of the semester. Participants will have the chance to discover and learn about historical figures whose experiences speak to many of the most pressing issues of today's world of (forced) migration, of aspirations to liberty, of violence and war, and of a rapidly changing natural environment.
As a participant you will do independent research on texts and visual material, choosing your own special field of interest, while nevertheless developing a broader sense of the many contradictory meanings and functions that faith and belonging have played in the history of the colonization of North America.
- Lehrende(r): Barbara Buchenau