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Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on the theoretical discussions on the articulation between whiteness, Europeanness and coloniality, this paper analyses how whiteness, as a colonial privilege, can be constructed in one context and sometimes contested in another, in particular through processes of migrantisation.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on the perspectives of critical whiteness and post/decoloniality, in particular on the theoretical discussions on the articulation between whiteness, Europeanness and coloniality, this paper analyses how whiteness, as a colonial privilege, can be constructed in one context and sometimes deconstructed or at least contested in another, in particular through migrantisation processes, often synonymous for racialisation.

These perspectives show that whiteness and coloniality are intrinsically linked and (re)produce processes of racialisation. Migration studies drawing on these perspectives show how the combination of whiteness and coloniality produces hierarchical categories of migrants, as in the case of immigration policies differentiating according to people’s ‘origin’. Furthermore, these categories are often used as synonyms for race. And Switzerland is no exception.

Therefore, I propose to put into perspective two national contexts for the construction of whiteness, Chile and Switzerland, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Chileans of European descent who have a migration experience to Switzerland, to examine several spaces in which this whiteness-coloniality nexus operates as a power relationship.

Participants’ life trajectories highlight the colonial construction of whiteness in Chile and, above all, the privileges it confers on people marked as European/white in this context. On the other hand, in the Swiss context, the hierarchical and often racialised categorisations of migration are affecting them at the institutional level and beyond, in their everyday lives, questioning the continuity of their privilege.