Borradura y visualización de las identidades afropoteñas en la producción cultural Argentina, siglos xviii-xxi
In Argentina, national space has been racially marked in official discourse as one predominantly white while indigenous and black populations have been marginalized from the construction of national cultural production and identities. George Andrews was the first scholar to recognize such oblivion when he stated that Argentineans use to tell their visitors “there are no blacks in Buenos Aires” (3). Since then, a scarce body of scholarship has examined the influence of Afrodescendants in music (Conde 2003; Ortiz y Conde 2009), language (Conde 2011), journalism (Geler 2010; Cirio 2009), and contemporary literature (Alberto 2015). Critically, these works have questioned the denial that Andrews recalled by focusing on a single period or cultural expression. To date, no study has approached the intersection between identity, space, and race relations in Argentina. My dissertation, Identidades silenciadas: aproximaciones críticas a la producción cultural afroporteña, siglos XVIII-XIX [Forgotten Identities: Critical Readings on Afroporteños Cultural Productions, 18th-20th Century], addresses the historical and cultural evolution of race relations, and identity construction which have informed limited access to urban space and unequal distribution of power in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I argue that Afroporteños –Afro-descendants who have lived in the Port of Buenos Aires– were willing to challenge the so-called absence to which they were being circumscribed by exercising their agency and asserting their belonging in the city. In order to demonstrate that, I examine legal documents, lithographs, newspapers, photographs, catalogs, and literary works that I collected at the National Library Mariano Moreno and General Archive. My analysis is focused on the identification of what I call “meaningful spaces of identity production” such as urban –the streets and the pulperia–, domestic, symbolic –the Afroporteño press–, and institutional ones –the archive and the museum–. A close reading of the interactions and the identities that afroporteños produced in these places reveals a network of social exchanges characterized by free will, fluidity, interpellation, and social mobility. My dissertation concludes that Afroporteños and their cultural heritage played a key role in the making of Argentina. Furthermore, it opens possibilities for reconstructing the cultural and historic experience of Afroporteños over time by putting into dialogue visual and written sources, a variety of periods, hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses. Finally, my project inscribes the case of Afroporteños into broader discussions of race in Latin America by reframing national identity in more inclusive terms and dealing with Afro-Latin American cultural heritage.
Argentina, Race relations, Afro descendants, Cultural Identities
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign