Revisiting race and ethnicity in Peru: intersectional and decolonizing perspectives

ABSTRACT

We introduce this special issue of LACES by first offering a critical overview of recent work that engages questions of race and ethnicity in Peru. Against the backdrop of contemporary developments at the national level, we argue for a decolonial, intersectional approach that recognizes and theorizes differences that are complex and cross-cutting, embracing not only ethnoracial but also gender-, class-, and sexuality-based differences. Contributors to this issue offer diverse perspectives on commingled vectors of difference and inequality in a variety of settings, from Andean communities to lowland, urbanizing contexts, and from coastal, cosmopolitan Lima to Peru’s global diaspora. The pieces that follow our introduction include research articles, review essays, and interviews with performance artists and social activists, affording readers the opportunity to rethink with us the shifting landscape of race and ethnicity in Peru and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Peru
• race
• gender
• decolonial
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While many sources consider recent developments in Peru, a useful and concise overview is offered by Carrión (2019) in his review essay on current works on modernizing Peru.

2. For scholarship on Afro-descendant Peruvians, see Feldman (2006), Rodríguez Pastor (2008), Golash-Boza (2011), and Luciano (2012).

3. For discussions of coloniality/modernity, see Quijano (2000) and Mignolo and Escobar (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Cox Hall

Amy Cox Hall is the author of Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (University of Texas, 2017; Spanish translation, IEP, 2020) and editor of The Camera as Actor: Photography and the Embodiment of Technology (Routledge, 2020). She is currently writing her second monograph, The Taste of Nostalgia: Food, Women and National Longing in Peru.

M. Cristina Alcalde

M. Cristina Alcalde is Marie Rich Endowed Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Associate Dean of Inclusion and Internationalization at the University of Kentucky. Her research areas include gender violence, migration, exclusion, and race and racialization. Her publications include Peruvian Lives across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home; The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru; Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought; and numerous articles and chapters.

Florence E. Babb

Florence E. Babb is the Anthony Harrington Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her latest book, Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (University of California Press, 2018), examines feminist debates centering Andean women from the 1970s forward. She is currently writing another book, Scaling Differences: Place, Race, and Gender in Andean Peru, a multisited ethnography based on her research in a rural indigenous community, a provincial Andean city, and among Andean migrants living in Lima.