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- Convenor:
-
Monica Moreno Figueroa
(University of Cambridge)
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- Location:
- ATB G108
- Start time:
- 11 April, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together research on both racism and anti-racism in the Americas, particularly in relation to Latin American peoples.The aim of the panel is then to advance a dialogue that will consolidate the construction of anti-racist strategies at a hemispheric and transnational level.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together research on both racism and anti-racism in the Americas, particularly in relation to Latin American peoples. We are interested in papers dealing with broader themes of racial identity politics in relation to gender and class, whiteness and privilege, but also work focused on anti-racist strategies, methodologies and advocacy. Papers could aim to answer questions such as: How are issues of whiteness and privilege hindering anti-racist efforts? What are the national and regional resistances against racial recognition? How are notions of race, gender and class working for and against anti-racist strategies? How to utilize mass media as a tool for the empowerment of anti-racist programs, policies, and political struggles in our distinct realities? If we consider the state a 'racial state', what are the possibilities and limitations of political strategies that seek the law as an instrument to redress racial injustice? What kind of legal strategies are possible? Is it possible, and desirable, to wage a struggle outside legal institutions? Can these two strategies—using the law, and extra-legal struggles—be mutually reinforcing, or are they always in tension? Under what conditions do our efforts to dismantle racism become "bureaucratized" and therefore limited in their results, and what can be done to avoid this problem? What kind of methodology would be suitable to a hemispheric research agenda given the distinct realities of our countries and the different ways racism manifests itself?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Monica Moreno Figueroa (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from a report on UNESCO’s International Coalition of Cities against Racism, this paper surveys their experiences in the Americas. It explores the kinds of approaches to what anti-racism is and does; the preferred anti-racist subjects; and how whiteness and privilege are addressed if at all.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will offer an initial analysis of recent United Nations initiatives against racism the Americas. Drawing from a UNESCO's 2012 report, which promotes the good practices that emerged from the International Coalition of Cities against Racism (ICCAR). The ICCAR, launched by UNESCO in 2004, aims to establish a network of cities committed to "develop and enhance policies related to the fight against racism, discrimination and xenophobia. This report is interesting in offering a starting point to examine the top-down international, national and local initiatives throughout the world to tackle racism. The paper will concentrate in surveying the experiences in the Americas and explore what kinds of approaches and understandings of what anti-racism is and can do are being putting forward. A key interest is in assessing what kinds of subjects are at the core of this anti-racist agenda and how it is addressing whiteness and racial privilege. Furthermore, how are these initiatives dealing with the specificities and ranges of racial projects in the Americas, where discourses of mestizaje, multiculturalism and post-racial politics are in contrasting interaction?
César Palacios González (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
The first eugenics movement categorized non-Caucasians human beings as second class. José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, contested this idea by proposing the creation of a new race “The Cosmic Race” as a way to bring national identity to the post-revolutionary Mexico; and to refute eugenics and racism.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to present and contextualize one of the first American philosophical counter-arguments against racism in the context of the first eugenics movements. From late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century eugenic supporters, movements and policies proliferated through Europe and America. The allegedly "scientific" research, and results, on the differences between races gave racism a "scientific" foundation that was largely embraced by conservative policy makers. In some places, like the United Sates, laws were tailor made in accordance with these "scientific" results; prohibiting interracial marriages, supporting sterilization and restricting formal education to certain racial groups. Mexico and Latin America were no strangers to the influence of eugenics and therefore racism; nonetheless the political and intellectual situation in Mexico, particularly with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, filtered in a very peculiar way the ideas of the eugenics movements. José Vasconcelos argued against a strong version of eugenics that regarded that Caucasians were at the top of the scale, and claimed in favour of the emergence of a new race "The Cosmic Race". The intention behind the emergence of this new race had two goals: the first one was to make race a materialization of Mexican national identity and the second one was to prove that traditional eugenics and racism were clearly mistaken.
Miriam Jerade Dana Olivia Gall (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM))
Paper short abstract:
We aim to explore Latin-American anti-Semitism through history and discourse. We will bring forward some defining features of this kind of racism in Mexico, so to explore the national and regional resistances that prevent to recognize this particular type of ethnico-racial discrimination
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to explore Latin-American anti-Semitism through history and discourse. Focusing on the Mexican case and its specific exposure to the state's Mestizophile ideology and its refusal to acknowledge racism, we will bring forward some defining features of this kind of racism, anti-Semitism, invested with a notorious historical density (Wieviorka 2005). Anti-Semitism displays violence without being closely related to social class or a structuring logic. Twentieth-century anti-Semitism in Mexico is connected with local migratory policies vis-à-vis Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime (Gleizer 2011). It has seemed to us that hate speech bridges ideological differences from extreme right nationalism in the 1930's and left-wing anti-Zionism in recent decades. Even though physical violence erupts only in few cases, anti-Semitism in Latin America has been used a discourse device to legitimize prejudices, even with state's support as is the case today in Venezuela.
From this perspective, our paper tries to answer some questions raised at this panel: What are the national and regional resistances that prevent to recognize this particular type of ethnico-racial discrimination? How are political strategies limited when it comes to fight racial injustice?
Gisela Carlos (Universidad Veracruzana)
Paper short abstract:
This debate focuses on how the concepts of whiteness and privilege are suffering reconfigurations. In order to do so, I will engage with task such as the historical concept of Mestizaje, the Abysmal Thought and the concept of Humanity.
Paper long abstract:
This debate focuses on how the concepts of whiteness and privilege are suffering reconfigurations owing to institutional discourses that might seem anti-racist or emancipatories. In order to do so, I will engage with task such as the historical concept of Mestizaje, its narratives of class, status and knowledge and subsequently its ideological implications as well; the Abysmal Thought of Boaventura de Sousa Santos where he sets the basis to understand the ways to manage certain practices such as racism: the consensus on one side, and the violence on the other side; and finally the concept of Humanity that is intrinsically related to Latin America -or the doubt about to be human being- worked by Gordon, Maldonado-Torres and Alejandro de Oto based on the Fanonian Philosophy from the Caribean thought. We will land on these three axes through some exemplifications of the mexican context and its education. That would be the core of this dialoge.
Keywords:
Whiteness, privilege, mestizaje, abysmal thought and humanity.