Defending White-Mestizo Invisibility through the Production of Indigenous Alterity: (Un)Marking Race in Ecuador’s Mainstream Press (original) (raw)
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Anthropological Theory, 2014
This article explores the role that images of a threatening racial other play in the exercise of power and demonstrates that the discursive framing of such threats provides insight into how responses to perceived risks become possible and politically desirable. Specifically, it examines print press coverage of the 1990 Indigenous uprising in Ecuador to examine how white-elites sought to defend the public invisibility of whiteness by framing Indigenous protestors as threatening racial others. Coverage of the 1990 uprising in Ecuador’s major newspapers encouraged a moral panic about the potential threat that “out of place” Indigenous protestors presented to white, urban society. In the absence of widespread Indigenous violence during the protest, white-elite print media formulated counterfactual accounts of the event that stressed the potential of Indigenous violence to upset national stability as a means to justify the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous political actors as national threats.
Whiteness in Political Rhetoric: A Discourse Analysis of Peruvian Racial-Nationalist "Othering"
Drawing upon Paulo Drinot's works on how racialized assumptions have been central to the transition toward industrialization, and neoliberalism in early 20 th-, and early 21 st-century Peru, respectively, this monograph analyses how contemporary powerful state agents efficiently naturalize whiteness among Peruvians by equating it with progress and constructing the non-core group as a racialized " Other " , in and through the articulation of language and meaning. I claim that direct, naked, and offensive anti-communist and anti-indigenous language is not the only, or the most efficient, way in which an antagonism is constructed in contemporary Peru. By understanding how whiteness operates in political rhetoric, we will be able to visualize more clearly how even the most common, widely accepted, and allegedly inoffensive expressions can be effective in the construction of racial antagonisms. In order to accomplish these objectives and support these claims, I will engage Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of discourse.
EXCERPTED FROM Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Ecuador: The Manipulation of Mestizaje
2020
List of Tables and Figures ix Preface xi Glossary of Key Concepts and Ethnic/Racial Terminology xv Note on Capitalization xvii 1 Introduction 1 2 Foxes and Lions: Studying the Upper Classes 15 3 Constructing Identities: The 2001 National Census 41 4 Economy, Etiquette, and Ethnicity: Defining Ecuadorian Elites 75 5 The Mestizo and the 'Other': Ethnic Narratives in Ecuador 95 6 The Port and Mestizaje: Ethnic Narratives in Guayaquil 7 Learning Mestizaje: Ethnic Narratives in Quito 8 Ethnic Narratives and Socioeconomic Development 9 Responsibility and Change 10 Conclusion Appendixes 1. Brief Chronology of Ecuadorian History 2. Methodological Overview 3. Statistical Data Bibliography Index
Rupture and the Maintenance of Indigenous Alterity: Crises, Borders and Race in Ecuador, 1941-2008
This article examines how narratives of historical rupture and crisis work to maintain, rather than upset, dominant racial hierarchies. An analysis of elite narrations of Ecuador’s border conflicts with Peru and Colombia between 1941 and 2008 demonstrates how such crisis narratives functioned as ongoing strategies for reinforcing indigenous peoples’ alterity within the Ecuadorian nation. Specifically, white-mestizo elites discursively framed these crises as historical breaks that necessitated new visions of the country’s future. Rather than bring histories of racial inequality to the fore, such crisis narratives worked to obscure them and sought to prevent meaningful considerations of enduring colonial politics in Ecuador.
Embodying National Identities: mestizo Men and White Women in Ecuadorian Racial-National Imaginaries
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1999
This article examines the connections between national identity, gender and racialized subjects in contemporary Ecuador. It focuses on the expressions of national identity among low-income urban residents in Quito, capital of Ecuador, and their engagement with the racialization of national identities. Evidence is provided to show that the racialization of national identities is significantly gendered, resulting in women and men claiming different racial-national identities for themselves. While racial-national ideologies promoting racial mixing (mestizaje) are well-known in Latin America, the ways in which gendered subjects identify themselves within such narratives has not previously been analysed. The paper concludes that differential national identities relate to spatial and gendered inscription by Ecuadorian nationalism's narratives and social relations. key words Ecuador national identity politics gender national systems of corporeal production Because constructions of gender and sexuality have been key for the formation of ethnic and national subjectivities and collectivities, the technologies of bio-power wielded by the state have had differential consequences for men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, for ethnic minorities and majorities. (Alonso 1994, 386)
Blackness in the Andes: Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism
2014
offers a detailed and diverse analysis of the cultural politics of blackness in contemporary Ecuador. This is accompanied by high-quality photographs available on Blackness in the Andes' associated website. Ecuador is a national context in which both scholarly and popular discourse on identity and difference have long neglected African descendants, instead focusing on the indigenous population so important to the Andean region generally, and the mestizo population considered most representative of the citizenry. Rahier's analysis is therefore both rare and impressively farreaching in its coverage of a population in Ecuador, and Afro-Latin America, which remains relatively understudied. Blackness in the Andes feels historically sedimented: it is the product of ethnography that extends into the late 1980s and six of the eight chapters are updated or reconfigured versions of essays previously published elsewhere between 1998 and 2012. The other two chapters, including one coauthored with Mamyrah Dougé
The Global South, 2012
This article provides a comparative analysis of Olmedo Alfaro’s El peligro antillano en la América Central: La defensa de la raza (1925) that situates the work within a transnational discursive and literary tradition. Examining the rhetorical and narrative strategies Alfaro employs to demonize West Indian immigrants in Central America, the study uncovers the location of white knowledge and the manifestations of an epistemology of disavowal within the work. Whereas Alfaro places racism outside of Panamanian borders and history, this essay illustrates the author’s commitment to global politics of racial domination. It shows that El peligro antillano is a testimony to the historical presence and endurance of a transnational white supremacist discourse linking Latin America, the United States, and Europe; the pan-white economic, political, and symbolic interests that shape it; and a long history of enforcing colorblindness in white supremacist literature.