Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, SSMS 4315
Join us for a conversation with Roosbelinda Cardenas (Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) and Tathagatan Ravindran (Center for Advanced Study, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico), whose newly published groundbreaking books offer an ethnographic lens onto indigenous political ideology. Comments will be provided by Charle Hale (Dean of Social Sciences, UCSB) and Jaime Alves (Black Studies, UCSB) will moderate.
Tathagatan Ravindran’s study, The Social Life of Indianism, shows how canonical Indianism—the original ideology that rejects Bolivia as enslaver of the Indian nation—provided philosophical ballast for exponents of a more popular folk Indianism that accommodates the Bolivian state and pursues Indigenous empowerment within it. Ravindran demonstrates how canonical Indianism was not refuted or supplanted; it refracted, in the broader public, into a new common sense.
Raising Two Fists is a historically grounded ethnography of Afro-Colombian political mobilization after the multicultural turn that swept Latin America in the 1990s, when states began to recognize and legally enshrine rights for Afro-descendants. Roosbelinda Cárdenas shows that while Afro-Colombians pursue rights-based claims, they also forge African Diasporic solidarities and protect the flourishing of their lives outside of the frame of rights, and with or without the state's sanction—a "two-fisted" strategy for Black citizenship.
This event is part of the Security and Refusal Series organized by the Black Cities Lab at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research, with the Security in Context Project of the Orfalea Center.