Paper short abstract:

The paper explores indigenous youth’s experiences of racism and discrimination in the Peruvian city of Pucallpa by unpacking the interplay between self-identification and "interculturality" among young urban Amazonians.

Paper long abstract:

Based on 33 months of fieldwork among university students in the Amazonian metropolis of Pucallpa, Peru, my paper focuses on how indigenous youth conceptualize their ethnic belonging in the city, where they attend “intercultural” universities; novel institutions which aim to incorporate ancestral knowledge into academic education. The intercultural educational project and the ambitions that it fosters target young Amazonians on the basis of their ethnic heritage, through processes which I describe as “marking” indigenous people and “un-marking” of mestizos (non-indigenous). My research recognizes that such processes profoundly shape Amazonian youth’s positionality, particularly regarding lived experiences of racism and discrimination. In particular, I explore how the emic category of culture comes to be used as a marker of ethnic difference, bound up in notions of the centrality of knowledge in constituting and negotiating young Amazonians’ ethnicity. On the one hand, Amerindian youth are understood as being the depositaries of a wealth of culture and knowledge now largely lost which, if recovered, would help to lead Peru to a future of prosperity and scientific and technological development. On the other hand however, these views coexist with structural racism, which places indigenous people at the very bottom of the Peruvian social pyramid. My ethnography shows how young Amazonians who self-identify or are marked by others as “indigenous” within the intercultural university classroom, and, more generally, within the city, find themselves in a rather untenable position, confronted as they are with the contradictory sets of values attached to their indigeneity.

Paper short abstract:

In their fonnkèr, the poets of Reunion Island bear witness to the uprooting caused by coloniality. Their performances indicate an alternative historicization, based on Creole diasporization, but also show a racialization in its intention to blackization.

Paper long abstract:

Reunion Island, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, is a post-slavery society. In the mid-2000s, slam-poetry began to develop here, presenting itself as popular, but rooted in a white American background. Reunion's oral poetry, fonnkèr, which has its roots in the colonial period, brings to light a hidden discourse (Scott, 2019): that of uprootedness. Its poets express their rejection of the "whitization" (Telep, 2018) and their attraction to a long-invisibilized Creole literature. Their choice of fonnkèr rather than slam-poetry is an opportunity for them to establish a filiation with local authors and enslaved ancestors, as well as to assert a hidden anti-colonial discourse. By historicizing their African and Asian origins, from which most enslaved people originated, they valorize miscegenation and put forward a pancreole diasporization, in which we perceive a blackization, which underlines both the logic of resistance put in place, but also the construction of an "inverted image of apartheid" (Tagg, 2008), in which persists the "discursive functioning of race" (Hall, 2019).

Hall Stuart, 2019, Race, ethnicité, nation, Editions Amsterdam, Paris.

Scott James C., 2019, La domination et les arts de la résistance, Editions Amsterdam, Paris.

Tagg Philip, 2008, « Lettre ouverte sur les musiques « noires », « afro-américaines » et « européennes » », Volume ! La revue des musiques populaires, 6, p. 135‑161.

Telep Suzie, 2018, « “Moi je whitise jamais.” Accent, subjectivité et processus d’accommodation langagière en contexte migratoire et postcolonial », Langage et société, 2018, vol. 165, p. 31‑49.

Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study looks at the role of Afrodescendent and African performing artists and organizers in an emerging Afro-Spanish politics. The performing arts becomes a tool for anti-racist pedagogy as artists and activists tackle institutional racism and issues of (in)visibility.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation traces the emergence of an Afro-Spanish politics and investigates the ways that sites of performance and anti-racist mobilization are intimately linked. Drawing on performance ethnography methods which involved participant observation in acting workshops, semi-structured interviews and collaboration with actors, directors and community organizers in Madrid and Barcelona, this research investigates how racial politics are both reconstituted and challenged in a range of performing arts and community action sites. Afrodescendent and African culture producers are part of an emerging Afro-consciousness movement which brings together people from multiple generations with varying migration histories, class backgrounds, and political subjectivities and claims (Partridge 2019). It draws attention to the ways in which members of la comunidad Afro (the Afro community) in Madrid and Barcelona, contend with questions of invisibility and hypervisibility, of la desmemoria historica (Aixelà-Cabré 2020, 2022). In particular, this ethnographic study looks at the role of Afrodescendent and African performing artists, culture producers, and organizers in an emerging Afro-Spanish politics in which mobilization and performance become integral to what Nitasha Sharma refers to as "racial lenses" (2019). It investigates how Afro-Spanish actors, dramaturgs and activists confront issues of historical erasure through performance and colonial memory work in an effort to places prevailing racial grammars and Spanish imaginaries under scrutiny (Shohat 2018).

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how identity politics is transforming Brazilian politics, and more specifically how Blackness is performed and contested by politicians. As they make sense of a changing political landscape, what strategies they use to claim legitimacy (and monopoly) over their own identities?

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss how identity politics is transforming electoral competition in Brazil, and more specifically how Blackness is performed, instrumentalised and contested by politicians. Having conducted ethnographic research among politicians and campaign workers, I analyse their often over-looked perspective to understand how these actors make sense of the changing political landscape, their own role in it, and the strategies they use to claim legitimacy (and monopoly) over their own identities. My research spans from 2018 to 2022, covering the exact tenure of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, including field visits and data collection during the three electoral campaign periods that took place during this period. Against this backdrop, my research zooms in on the traditional left-leaning cities of Recife and Olinda (Pernambuco), where the realigning of political forces is affected by national politics at the same time that it makes concrete and explicit some of tensions of global political transformations. My study also offers insights into what Brazilian politics will increasingly become: a political arena where the identities of political candidates are not only central to defining voters' choices but also the locus of competition for legitimacy and hegemony, by answering the following questions: Who is allowed to claim Blackness as a political platforms? Is Blackness as a political identity a monopoly of the Left? What are the expectations for those who do capitalize on Blackness? What happens to politicians who cannot claim minoritised identities, as they lose space to new and often younger politicians?

Paper short abstract:

Immigration to Poland, previously unknown on a large scale, has intensified debates about identity. Some of the migrants are Muslims, who have even been created as a separate 'race'. Inadvertently, anthropologists critical of racism have contributed to the creation of this new racial concept.

Paper long abstract:

The refugee crisis in 2015 increased Islamophobic attitudes in many parts of Polish society. Influenced by historical images and politically stimulated public discourses, Muslim refugees were created as a separate 'race'. In a racialising manner, perceptions of their religious denomination, physical characteristics, citizenship and territorial origin come together. Typical mechanisms of cultural racism are involved. The invented folk category exploits racialised characteristics in shaping the cognitive map and in structuring relations between people – in this case between Muslim refugees and the (potentially) receiving or host society. These phenomena were visible in the right-wing authorities' racialising and dehumanising campaign and the harsh regime on the Polish-Belarusian border. Ideologies and practices towards Muslim migrants were radically different from those towards refugees from Ukraine, who were perceived as culturally, racially and territorially close.

Anthropologists have responded to these developments in a variety of ways by: protesting against blatant racism in the media, in official statements, and against racially motivated violence; helping refugees; criticising covert racism; and making public anti-racist arguments. In doing so, however, they have contributed to the (re)production of racial categories. The concept of race has been rearticulated in what was until recently a nationally homogeneous community, distinct from colonial metropolises and immigrant societies. Moreover, the Muslim population remains virtually absent what makes Islamophobia ‘phantom.’ In this paper, the intricacies of racism as a (re-)emerging concept and as a practice – both of which are contingent on post-socialist socio-historical circumstances and on disciplinary and public discourses – will be discussed.

Paper short abstract:

Migrations have deeply changed many societies in the world and imposed to African countries to [re]consider relations between people who are sharing their national area. This qualitative study looks at the current state of relations between communities in Douala’s city in Cameroon.

Paper long abstract:

Migrations have profoundly changed many societies around the world and have forced African countries to [re]consider the relationships between the people who share their national space. Historically, Africa has a long experience of racial exchange in various fields such as trade, education, etc. In fact, Cameroon is attractive because of its diversity in terms of geography, weather, culture, etc. This study – in progress – is based on the analysis of different perception of black people on their neighbors whites mostly came from abroad. The research want to identify the difference that black people have established between whites from different origin and living in a cosmopolitan city of Douala. This qualitative study is based on a probabilistic sample of 25 persons expected from various socioeconomic activities. Then, data will be collected through semi-directive interviews and will analyze by Atlas-ti, SPSS – softwares. Moreover, the theory of Social Representation from Jodelet will be mobilized to understand what makes the difference between whites generally according to local populations. Consequently, the first results show that 35% of respondents think that whites are the same and they still associate them to colonization and oppression. But, the other part of the [pre]collected perceptions illustrates certain differences between the former whites who are now integrated and the new arrivals in the country. These newcomers are widely accused to use brutality and violence when they collaborate with local groups in business. This study looks at the current state of relations between communities in Cameroon.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the Romani anti-racist protests in the Czech Republic, which in certain situation were directed against Ukrainian refugees. Based on this situation, the author calls for a reframing of the situation of Roma as dominated and situates them in the broader racial hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

The war in Ukraine has revealed the full extent of the securitization of the Roma and their heavily racialized position in the Czech Republic. First and foremost, it was the Roma from Ukraine who were securitized and systematically excluded as "undeserving refugees" from the otherwise unprecedented assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. Gradually, however, it was primarily Czech Roma who, amid a general moral appeal for solidarity with Ukraine/Ukrainians, began to increasingly express frustration with the persistence of anti-Romani racism, long unaddressed and even downplayed by the state. Public protests by Roma gradually turned against Ukrainians themselves, escalating after the death of a young Roma man, in which a Ukrainian man was identified as the assailant. Many Roma began to label Ukrainians as a security risk and joined similar public manifestations led by representatives of nationalist parties.

The author argues that this situation forces a reframing of the prevailing understanding of the position of Roma in the binary opposition of "dominant" vs. "dominated". On the other hand, it is necessary to understand the position of the Roma as distinct actors in the dynamic processes of racialization and securitization and to situate them within complex racial hierarchies and broader power relations. Moreover, the protesting Roma – mostly from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds – explicitly questioned the position of so-called Romani representatives and activists. In doing so, they were reminding the class conditionality of the experience of racism and thus illuminating the limits of the policies of the existing Romani movement.

Paper short abstract:

Capturing racism in a context in which the biological non-existence of race and its unimportance for the medical practices are affirmed, requires we think ways to “staying with the trouble”. Taking race as biosocial I´ll reflect on methods that can explore racism on its long-term effects.

Paper long abstract:

I will seek to present in this panel the way in which race and racism materialize in everyday practices in the health field. These reflections are the result of my doctoral research, in which I dealt with the challenge of capturing race and the effects of racism, in a context in which, repeatedly, the biological non-existence of race and its unimportance for the medical field were affirmed. However, race has always been an absent presence, which escaped discourses, decisions, technologies and health interventions. Starting from the contributions of STS Studies to capture the ontological multiplicity that race gains in these spaces and, reflecting on the reality effects that racism promotes, I will seek to contribute to the reflection on innovative methodological proposals to capture race in biosocial terms, this by exploring the way in which race is inscribed into the body. To this end, I will explore some insights from the ethnographic work I have been carrying out with a birth cohort in Southern Brazil, within the scope of the Pot Doc project "Biosocial Lives of Birth cohorts" (UCL), trying to reflect on how such cohort studies have the potential to explore the effects of racism on its long-term approach.