Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil. Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out. But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time. I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed. The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy. Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…
This year’s November celebration of African culture in Argentina is dedicated to the memory of Maria Magdalena Lamadrid — “La Pocha” — an Afro-Argentine activist who died in September. In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there are no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.
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Julia Cohen Ribeiro poses for a photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Nov. 12, 2021. Ribeiro had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then at age 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Her hair was curly, but her skin was light. She had never identified as anything other than Brazilian in her country of birth. Then 11, she was shocked when people on the street and in school in Buenos Aires insisted that she was Black.
“I was never told I was Black growing up,” said Ribeiro, now a 25-year-old film student at the University of Buenos Aires. The daughter of a white mother and Black father, she has since embraced that identity and joined a burgeoning Afro-Argentine movement that seeks to eliminate the persistent myth that there are no Black people in the country and to combat discrimination against them.
The 2010 census recorded about 150,000 people of African descent in Argentina, a nation of 45 million, but activists estimate the true figure is closer to 2 million following a surge of immigration — and because many Argentines have forgotten or ignore African ancestry…