Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

102 reframing latin america
is “black” or “white” or “indigenous” does not therefore say everything
about that person. S/he may also be old/young, female/male, homosexual/
heterosexual, rich/poor and so on: there are crosscutting identifi cations.
Thus the point remains that racial identifi cations seem similar to ethnic
identifi cations: both are partial, unstable, contextual, fragmentary [. . .].
Racial and ethnic identifi cations do, however, overlap, both analytically
and in practice. At an abstract level, both race and ethnicity involve a
discourse about origins and about the transmission of essences across generations.
Racial identifi cations use aspects of phenotype as a cue for categorization,
but these are seen as transmitted intergenerationally—through the
“blood”—so that ancestral origin is important; likewise ethnicity is about
origin in a cultural geography in which the culture of a place is absorbed by
a person (almost “into the blood”) from previous generations. On a more
practical level, if ethnicity invokes location in a cultural geography, it may
be the case that the phenotypical traits used in racial discourse are distributed
across that geography: in Colombia, for example, “blacks” are located
in certain parts of the country. Also, ethnic identifi cations may be made
within a single racial category and vice versa, so that any individual can
have both racial and ethnic identities.
Discussion Questions
• According to Blum’s nine-point typology of racial ideology in the
nineteenth-century United States, what is a racial essence?
• What is the social construction of race, according to Blum?
• If ethnicity supposedly refl ects one’s culture or place of origin, how is
it that Wade argues that it, like race, has come to be defi ned by an “in the
blood” sort of essentialism?
• How does Wade’s discussion of ethnicity as based on a sense of place
or origin mirror Hall’s description of the “old” ethnicity; by extension,
how does Wade’s argument parallel Hall’s appeal to the “new” ethnicity?
Notes
1. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993).
2. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology
and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America
1600–1650,” The American Historical Review 104 (Feb ru ary 1999): 33–68.
3. Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist But . . .”: The Moral Quandary of
Race (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002). Excerpt taken from 127–128, 156–160.
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).