Abeyamí Ortega (UoM): 'The ‘mestizo gaze’ and the ‘scopic regime of mestizaje’: Racial logics, visual culture, and citizenship in Mexico'
| Dates: | 24 November 2021 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Abeyamí Ortega |
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Part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.
This event will be on campus (Samuel Alexander A101) but you can also follow it via Zoom. Here is the link: https://zoom.us/j/94462492930
Abstract: In this talk, I introduce two concepts: the ‘mestizo gaze’ and the ‘scopic regime of mestizaje’ to analyse the relations between racism, mediatized visual culture, and citizenship practices in Mexico. Like other countries in Latin America where national identity is foregrounded by mestizaje (mixed-‘blood’) myths, in Mexico, racism is pervasive yet usually unacknowledged or denied. Racism in Mexico operates primarily through ‘mestizaje logics of Mexican racism’, the politics of racist prejudice based on mixed-race discourses which privilege and aspire to whiteness (Moreno Figueroa 2010).
The shape of the exclusions produced by mestizaje logics is defined by the representations generated by what I call “the mestizo gaze,” a privileged, racist looking position and action that enables the “scopic regime of mestizaje”: assemblages of sensorial racialized representations that stem the “mestizaje logics” of Mexican racism. The function of the mestizo gaze is to materialize the agenda of mestizo politics and the narrative of mestizaje through the production of social visual, aural, and other sensorial representations. Hence, as a social act of seeing, the mestizo gaze institutes who has the social capital to exert the right to see and to be seen in the public sphere, and in what terms.
Speaker
Abeyamí Ortega
Role: Postdoctoral Research Associate
Organisation: The University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A101
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
