?Narratives of racialization and whitening in the Rio de la Plata, 19th Century?

MAGDALENA CANDIOTI

Paris

Workshop; Tepsis International Workshop ?How do social sciences address race??; 2017

Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales

In order to contribute to the understanding of the construction of the image of a white Argentina, I will analyze a series of public narratives that circulated between 1812 and 1852. I intend to scrutinize their assumptions about the "otherness" of Africans, blacks, mulattoes, slaves that explicitly operated there and the strategies proposed to "overcome" or ?reduce? such otherness.These very diverse narratives include: an article published in the newspaper Gaceta de Buenos Aires in 1812 on the danger represented by the castes in the revolutionary context; an essay written in the form of a letter in response to Abbé Grégoire, Bishop of Blois, in 1818 by the Bishop of Córdoba, Deán Funes, discussing whether the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas promoted or not African slavery; a Manual of Piety for Men of Color (written precisely by the same Abbé Grégoire) and published in Buenos Aires 1839; and, finally, an anonymous article published in 1852 on the inconvenience of having segregated National Guards. My methodological strategy is to make an in-depth and detailed reading of these texts paying particular attention to their categories and inflections, to their proposals about how to deal with alterity, and to their diverse ways of conceiving the "foundation" of otherness (either blackness, African ancestry, or slavery). The analysis seeks to clarify how they helped to reconfigure racial looks and hierarchies in the republican context (a time in which the caste system was being criticized) and to boost mestizaje and whitening. These narratives are not central texts of the Argentine canon but the opposite: marginal and forgotten interventions of an underlying and unspoken concern of elites about the full integration (or not) of former slaves.