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Michelle McKinley
Michelle McKinley is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Oregon. She attended Harvard Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. McKinley has been active internationally, serving as the Managing Director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples.
Abstract
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Hybridity and Racial Formations in Colonial Latin America”
This paper compares the legal construction of race with the social and cultural constructions of ethnic identity. I use Latin America as a case study for exploring the lived vis-à-vis the imposed legal constructions of ethnic identity. Interrogating the theme of “racial democracy” in Latin America, the case studies proposed here examine the constitutive nature of “race” itself in Iberian thought as reflected in the socio-legal recognition of mestizo categories. Iberian flexibility in incorporating miscegenation is the source of controversy regarding Latin American “racial democracy” and those who discount the significance or determinative status of race on socio-political condition and in Latin American nation-building. Notwithstanding the debate, Iberian flexibility is often contrasted with the rigid Anglophone parochialism that subjected peoples of mixed racial descent during the colonial period to bipolar racial thought and discrimination. Is the racial democratic project feasible? How do we contrast the ideal of racial democracy with the politicization of race in Latin America, specifically the growth of multiculturalism? How do 'racial democracies' deal with multi-cultural politics? How has the politicization of race in Latin America affected countries' assessment of themselves as racial democracies? What are the implications for hybrid ethnic identities when race gets politicized (as in the case of indigenous peoples and Afro-Latinos) and when miscegenation becomes pigeonholed into a binary of black/white here in the United States? And finally, how do we compare the racial democratic project with the legacy of the one-drop rule in the US that persists—albeit less so in contemporary legal constructions of race. How does the legal regime contrast with how race is — and has been lived and experienced? Thinking about this in the context of the performativity of race, one can ask what it means for Latin America to adopt multicultural reforms, when there are supposedly not cultural forms associated with particular racial groups.
The paper will analyze the common trajectories of multicultural states in Latin America with trends in the United States to adequately deal with hybrid ethnic identities. Is Latin America is becoming like the US in terms of adopting multicultural reforms and affirmative action (in Brazil), and is the US becoming more like Latin America in terms of developing a color-blind racial ideology, and intermediate categories, moving beyond the binary? And, how can we have intermediate, ambiguous categories in the US when racial identities are so important to people?
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 1:00 p.m. as part of the Panel II discussion "Historical Formations of Race.
Select Publications
“Cultural Culprits,” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice 24:2, forthcoming.
“Moral Geographies and Intimate Spaces,” Oregon Review of International Law 9, 2007.
“Emancipatory Practices and Rebellious Politics: Incorporating Global Human Rights in Family Violence Laws in Peru,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 39, 2006.
“Planning Other Families: Negotiating Population and Identity Politics in the Peruvian Amazon,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
10:1, 2003.
“In Our Own Voices: Women's Radio Programming in the Amazonian Mediascape,” with Lene Jensen, Critical Studies in Media Communication 20:2, 2003.
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