"No somos invisibles": Confronting Colonial Legacies of Racism in Narratives of Afro-Peruvian Cultural Heritage

Summary

In 2009, Peru apologized to its citizens of African descent for the discrimination enacted against them since the colonial period. Since this address, the government has instituted a series of initiatives to evaluate the state of the Afro-descendent population today. A key outcome of these efforts has been the expansion of Afro-Peruvian studies, an inter-disciplinary research program that aims to produce knowledge about Afro-Peruvian culture from a historical perspective. However, much of this scholarship continues to operationalize racialized stereotypes of Afro-Peruvian culture, which further perpetuates this community’s marginalization. In this paper, I argue that archaeology offers a powerful analytical tool for deconstructing these narratives. Using my ongoing dissertation research in central Peru as a case study, I suggest that community-based archaeology can contribute to the process of confronting issues of racism in Peru’s past, and in doing so, provide a historical framework that can guide reform in the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2018   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 112