Teaching Uncle Tom's Cabin in Transnational and Hemispheric Perspective

This presentation aims at fostering discussion on how to actually structure courses from a hemispheric perspective, utilizing my own experiences with an undergraduate lecture course I am developing—Gender and Citizenship in the Americas—as the basis for my reflections. This course explores how processes of gender formations shape the making of political discourses and practices about rights and belonging. We approach these entwined phenomena of boundary-drawing from a comparative, hemispheric perspective—the US (1840s-90s), Argentina (1920s-50s), and Brazil (1980s-present)—to analyze the myriad ways that gendered identities are produced, rendered natural, and made politically relevant within different historical contexts. We will pay close attention to, both, how gendered and political identities are constituted, and why gender has historically been central to the fashioning of politics and ideas about citizenship.

I want to utilize this professional workshop as an opportunity to pose various questions that I consider central for classes on the Americas, including: how does the US fit into this narrative, and how much on or about the US and Canada is necessary to properly balance the overall geographic focus? How do we situate the category of “Latin America” within such a course? What are the normative assumptions about gender and citizenship that one should confront at the outset of the course, and others that we should address along the way?