The Workshop on Constructing Difference in Colonial Latin America meets to critique and to improve participants' current work and publication projects exploring the making of difference in colonial Latin America, including work on the African Diaspora, indigenous communities, and the meaning of 'casta'. The Workshop is open to a variety of interrogations with a central focus on how people in colonial Latin America imagined and maintained their identities. Workshop organizers strive to bring together a forum of researchers who employ a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches including qualitative and quantitative, cultural and social, literary and historical. Although the Workshop maintains a primary interest in the periods before, or transitions to, national independence, the workshop welcomes post-colonial and transnational interventions.

The workshop will be conceptually and thematically wide-ranging; nevertheless, many papers will particularly address the following themes:

• The problems involved in writing the history of identity and difference of peoples who for the most part did not write their own.
• Interdisciplinary concerns, especially how historians can most effectively use anthropological, linguistic, and literary insights for the writing of history and ethnohistory.
• Questions of accommodation, resistance, acculturation/transculturation, mestizaje, and hybridity.
• The wider cultural and social impact of syncretism, messianism and other revitalization movements, and the "extirpation of idolatry" campaigns.
• How to employ culturally nuanced and "unfixed" categories of gender, ethnicity, and "race" that are theoretically sound and historically grounded.

Papers (in English or Spanish) will be circulated before the workshop. Senior and junior colleagues as well as graduate students are welcome to participate. Participants are not required to present a paper. Now in its third year, the workshop will be held on Friday afternoon & all day on Saturday--March 11 & 12, 2005--on the campus of Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut.

To participate in the workshop, send your title and abstract and/or intention to attend by December 6, 2004 to Rachel O’Toole (e-mail address given below).

For more information, contact Leo Garofalo or Rachel O'Toole:

Leo J. Garofalo
Assistant Professor of History
Winthrop Hall
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Av
New London, CT 06320
(860) 439-2098
lgar@conncoll.edu

Rachel Sarah O'Toole (contact information provided below)

Transportation:
Amtrak stops in New London, and a cab to campus is five minutes. It is possible to fly into the Groton/New London airport. However, the nearest major airports are: Providence, RI (45 minutes) and Hartford (75 minutes). By car or Amtrak, New London is two and half-hours from New York City and two hours from Boston.