The work of Bartolome de Las Casas poses a number of challenges in the classroom: students need help seeing the relevance of a sixteenth-century Dominican missionary to their lives, understanding his colonial-imperial context, and negotiating the apparent contradictions among his evangelizing and his varying stances on Indian and black slavery in the New World. The essays gathered in this volume show teachers how to introduce and engage with Las Casas-one of the first voices to criticize European treatment of the native populations of the Americas and crucial today to studies of imperialism, colonialism, and human rights-in a wide range of courses, undergraduate and graduate. Like all volumes in the Approaches series, this collection includes a convenient survey of original and supplementary materials and a comprehensive array of classroom tactics. The first group of essays incorporates Las Casas into the interdisciplinary classroom, while the next group focuses on teaching the Las Casas text most widely used in literature courses: the Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias, a dramatic, largely firsthand view of colonial violence. The essays that follow explore the Spanish friar's letters, treatises, and petitions to the Crown; locate his connection to such broader issues as independence movements in Latin America, inter-European politics, abolition, and human rights; and suggest ways of teaching him alongside colonial figures such as Christopher Columbus and within the literary traditions of a variety of nations and languages.
Santa Arias is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas. She has published Retorica, historia y polemica en el Nuevo Mundo: Bartolome de las Casas y la tradicion intelectual renacentista (2001), coedited Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Identity, Culture, and Experience (2002), and is working on "Spaces of Conversation in Colonial Spanish America: From Sacred Texts to Contested Territories." Her coedited volume The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is forthcoming. Eyda M. Merediz is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her publications include a critical edition of Lope de Vega's play Los guanches de Tenerife (2003) and a book, Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings (2004). She is working on a coedited volume on the intersections of transatlantic and Latin American studies (Otros estudios transatlanticos: Lecturas desde lo latinoamericano) as well as a monograph onBartolomede Las Casas.
"While rooted in colonial studies, Approaches to Teaching the Writing of Bartolome de Las Casas represents a valuable contribution to a number of fields beyond its immediate disciplinary scope. It succeeds where others fail in making a persuasive case for the value of turning to writings from the past, and from the Hispanic tradition, to gain insights about our global present." --Yari Perez Marin, Northwestern University "This volume brings Las Casas's bold debates into twenty-first-century classrooms. It meets an urgent and long overdue need with contributions of high quality and extraordinary usefulness across a wide spectrum of multidisciplinary and multilingual perspectives in the humanities." --Maureen Ahern, Ohio State University
