Interdisciplinary Symposia on Latin America
The Social Production of Difference and Distance and the Lived Responses to Categorization Within Black Ibero-America
Description
Dr. Mariselle Meléndez and Dr. Ben Vinson III make up this panel. Governing bodies, religious authorities, and local land- and slave-owners created definitions of difference in the Americas, using terms such as race, caste, republic, and calidad. . These differences, in turn, justified Iberian imperial and colonial projects. . Groups who were subordinated by these definitions often pushed back or negotiated their relationships to the imposed categories in a fluid exchange of identity definition. . From this fluidity emerged renegotiations of the meaning of the differences and distance that the Iberian colonizers attempted to impose. . . This panel examines how and why social relations become contextualized by structural forces and geographic contexts such that they influence and in turn are influenced by people. . . Specifically, this panel considers the social production of identity as an interactive process in Ibero-America among and between groups who were subordinated, as well as between subordinated groups and Iberian colonizers.
Publication Date
4-19-2011
Recommended Citation
Meléndez, Dr. Mariselle; Dr. Ben Vinson III; and Dr. Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz. "The Social Production of Difference and Distance and the Lived Responses to Categorization Within Black Ibero-America." (2011). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/greenleaf_symposia/2
Comments
Dr. Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz moderates this fourth panel of the 2011 Richard E. Greenleaf Colonial Studies Conference: Africans and Their Descendants in the Early Modern Ibero-American World. It was a two-day, interdisciplinary conference which provided a forum for eight of the foremost scholars of the Afro-Ibero Atlantic world to join UNM faculty members to explore questions related to the negotiation of identity, place, difference and categorization within the Early Modern period. The dialogue which emerged from the conference built upon the rich history of colonial studies at the University of New Mexico. The conference was made possible by Dr. Richard E. Greenleaf's generous contribution and support from the LAII's US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant.