In the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, James D. Fernandez and I have for several years been co-teaching an undergraduate course titled “The Iberian Atlantic,” which has forced us to grapple with the complex movement of bodies, commodities, and texts throughout (and beyond) the Iberian Atlantic world. Given our different disciplinary backgrounds—Fernández received his doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures and I in Latin American History—this course provides us with the space to explore and critique the shifting terrain of disciplinary boundaries and methodological approaches—ours as well as those of the scholars whose works we read. One of the primary goals of this course is to examine and historicize how the vast body of water now known as the Atlantic has, across the centuries, served as a conduit allowing for contact between South and North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Europe through trade and conquest, language, biological and scientific exchange, religious devotions, ideologies of race and gender, slavery, and diasporic movements.

This essay offers an analytical and course-based exploration of the inherent paradox that is the “Iberian Atlantic” (or, if we move beyond an admittedly myopic focus on Spain, Portugal, and their colonies, the “transatlantic” or, as seen most recently in the work of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Erik Seeman, and others, the “Anglo-Iberian Atlantic”) (Cañizares-Esguerra 2018; Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman 2017). It thus serves as a practical resource for those of us who, like Fernández and myself, teach courses on the Iberian Atlantic or transatlantic worlds, but who also struggle with the very conceptual and linguistic frameworks around which such courses are oriented. In doing so, I draw on Fernandez's and my own experiences to share what has, despite certain struggles and limitations, worked well for us in terms of pedagogy and introducing undergraduate students to theory alongside primary texts and secondary literature—both in original languages and in translation. At NYU, “The Iberian Atlantic” was implemented as a required course for both the Spanish major and minor in 2011. It was designed to substitute two previously required courses that focused, respectively, on cultural and literary production in medieval/early modern Iberia and in colonial Latin America.