Melissa M Valle | Rutgers University - Newark (original) (raw)

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Papers by Melissa M Valle

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2022

Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Bla... more Why are residents of a city racialized as Black overwhelmingly in favor of representations of Blackness that caricature Afro-descendants as subservient, hypersexual and licentious, jovial, uninhibited and libertine, primitive (folklorized), and violent? This article bridges the literatures on the sociology of culture and cognition, racial signification, and frame theory to explore the various sociomental lenses and schemata that people use to perceive racial symbols and evaluate their legitimacy. It uses semi-structured and open-ended photo-elicitation interviews, primarily with residents of a largely-Afro-descendant community in Cartagena, Colombia, to systematically generate a collection of readings and evaluations of racialized imagery, resulting in an empirical example of the socio-optical construction of race within the Colombian cultural context. These readings and evaluations of external cultural primers such as photographs of racialized performance and ritual reveal (1) how a Colombian Atlantic Coastal “optical community” connects the signifiers and signifieds of Blackness; (2) that racial frames evoke three primary schemas (personal, spatiotemporal, and explicitly ideological), which interpreters use to decode and evaluate images; (3) that interpreters read the racial frames transmitted by cultural producers (e.g., performance artists and festival goers) via the visual language of racialized imagery as collectively credible and/or personally salient, and that this visual resonance is how the racialized imagery gain legitimacy and; (4) that personal experience, cultural knowledge, and social location account for variations in whether people consider racialized imagery credible and salient and, as such, legitimate forms of recognition.

City & Community, 2021

How can the gentrification scholarship of US urban sociologists be enhanced by expanding beyond t... more How can the gentrification scholarship of US urban sociologists be enhanced by expanding beyond the confines of the Global North to include empirical and theoretical analyses of Southern gentrifications? This article engages the debate around the utility of the gentrification concept outside of postindustrial Northern cities. It argues that, in contrast to geographers and other interdisciplinary urbanists, many
US-based sociologists have unduly overlooked or minimized two aspects of gentrification that may be more clearly observed in the Global South: the roles of local political-economic forces and the state. This article also notes what the discipline of sociology can add to apt explorations of gentrification in the Global South. It marries the oft-disparate discourses of sociologists of gentrification primarily in North America and Western Europe with geographers and other urbanists conducting gentrification research in the Global South in order to globalize the sociology of gentrification.

Public Culture, 2019

This essay examines the ideological power of Carnival and the carnivalesque on the Colombian Cari... more This essay examines the ideological power of Carnival and the carnivalesque on the Colombian Caribbean Coast by circumnavigating the dominant narrative about these events as primarily stages to transgress social norms and resist authority. Instead, it explores whether blackface and other forms of racial impersonation performed during these festivities are globally migrating manifestations of anti-Blackness. It argues that in order to achieve visual resonance, performers rely on taken-for-granted propositions about how Blackness works in Colombian society and that in the absence of such objectivated social knowledge, as Stuart Hall describes it, the racialized characters Las Negritas Puloy, Las Palenqueras/Las Negras Bollongas, and El Son de Negro would be illegible to audiences. These three popular representations of Blackness ascribe particular behaviors and ways of being to phenotypic variations associated with Blackness (skin complexion, hair texture, body type, etc.). This essay demonstrates the racial subordination that can develop, fester, and be reproduced through debasing cultural productions in an environment where anti-Black racism is typically invisibilized and trivialized.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jan 24, 2018

Published online: 24 Jan 2017 In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentr... more Published online: 24 Jan 2017
In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2017

For this issue of IJURR’s “Spotlight on” web series, we asked scholars working in a variety of se... more For this issue of IJURR’s “Spotlight on” web series, we asked scholars working in a variety of settings to critically reflect on the contemporary inscription of race on urban space, in light of the growing prominence of local and transnational racial justice social movements. The six resultant essays presented here come together to form a clarion call that mirrors those movements in their varied forms. This call demands that urban scholars recognize with urgency the ways that black lives have been excluded from and rendered invisible in urban space. It also calls attention to diverse forms of resistance that are emerging to address this exclusion. These essays highlight some of the many groups working in cities across the globe to make themselves visible and to assert their humanity in the face of dehumanizing processes. As Melissa Valle argues in the opening essay, race is too often elided with economic stratification and thus erased or minimized in urban studies. The essays presented here represent a counterforce to that trend, showcasing the powerful work of scholars across disciplines interested in race, justice, and the city.

Revista de Trabajo Social de la Escuela de Trabajo Social de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Dec 2014

This exploratory study seeks to demonstrate the mechanisms which lead to reduced life chances fo... more This exploratory study seeks to demonstrate the mechanisms which lead to reduced life chances
for marginalized groups, as well as to understand how they negotiate stigma perspectives that
suggest their identities have been devalued. It provides a qualitative empirical account of the
experiences of Afro-descendants presently living in Santiago, Chile, and contributes to the debate
on the realities of migrants in Latin America from the perspective of an understudied, often
marginalized and excluded population. Forty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted
with adult migrants of visibly of African-descent (27 female, 22 male) from 4 continents and
15 countries, between April and May 2013. The interviews lasted an average of 25 minutes each
and were conducted in Spanish or English. While this study can only provide a snapshot into the
lives of some Afro-descendant migrants living in Chile, preliminary findings suggest that this
population is experiencing racism and xenophobia, with which they must regularly contend, and
that the strategies they employ to cope with their exclusion from society have the effect of both
reinterpreting their own realities and contesting the negative stereotypes used to disparage them.

Revista de Trabajo Social de la Escuela de Trabajo Social de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Dec 2014

En este estudio exploratorio se busca demostrar los mecanismos que llevan a la reducción de las ... more En este estudio exploratorio se busca demostrar los mecanismos que llevan a la reducción de las
oportunidades de vida de los grupos marginados. De igual forma, se busca comprender la manera
en que estos grupos negocian las perspectivas de estigma que postulan que sus identidades han
sido devaluadas. Esta investigación ofrece un testimonio empírico de las experiencias de afrodescendientes
que actualmente residen en Santiago de Chile, y aporta al debate de las realidades
de los inmigrantes en América Latina desde la perspectiva de una población poco estudiada y
generalmente marginada y excluida. Se llevaron a cabo cuarenta y ocho entrevistas semiestructuradas
con inmigrantes adultos visiblemente afrodescendientes (27 mujeres y 22 hombres) de 4
continentes y 15 países entre los meses de abril y mayo del año 2013. Las entrevistas tuvieron una
duración promedio de 25 minutos cada una y fueron realizadas en inglés o español, dependiendo
del caso. Aunque este estudio solo puede brindar una mirada superficial de las vidas de algunos
de los inmigrantes afrodescendientes viviendo en Chile en el presente, los hallazgos preliminares
sugieren que esta población experimenta y lucha regularmente contra el racismo y xenofobia, y
que las estrategias que se emplean para luchar contra la exclusión de la sociedad tienen el efecto
tanto de reinterpretar sus propias realidades como de luchar contra los estereotipos negativos que
se utilizan para desacreditarlos.