The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Black): Legal and Cultural Constructions of Race and Nation in Colonial Latin America
Michelle McKinley, Law, University of Oregon
Coach House, Green College, UBC
September 20, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
This talk offers an insight into the colonial legacies of Latin American racial formations. Michelle McKinley will trace the legal construction and development of mixed racial categories in early colonial Lima (Peru) in both ecclesiastical courts and enumeration procedures. Interrogating the discourse of “racial democracy” and its associated racial projects of mestizaje and indigenismo in Latin America, McKinley will discuss case studies that examine the constitutive nature of “race” itself in Iberian thought as reflected in the socio-legal recognition of hybridized 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—as opposed to class—on socio-political condition in Latin America.
Iberian flexibility is often contrasted with the more rigid Anglophone parochialism that subjected peoples of mixed racial descent during the colonial period to bipolar racial thought and discrimination. How does the legal regime augment, or contradict the ways in which race is and has been lived and experienced? Are legal identities coterminous with socially constructed identities of race? What role does the law play in elaborating racial projects? How do racial democracies deal with multicultural political movements that demand legal remedies to ameliorate racial disparities? What are the implications for hybridity when race gets politicized, implicitly using a model of agitational politics? How has the politicization of race in Latin America affected countries’ assessment of themselves as racial democracies?
Michelle McKinley teaches Law, Culture & Society, Immigration Law, Public International Law, and Refugee & Asylum Law. Professor McKinley attended Harvard Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and graduated cum laude in 1995. Professor McKinley also holds a Masters Degree in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. Professor McKinley is the former Managing Director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She is also the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples’ Resources Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.