Social Science Research Council

The Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, in coordination with other SSRC programs and staff, is developing an initiative entitled “Rethinking Race, Rethinking the Americas” that seeks to foster sustained dialogue and promote innovative research on the subject of racial formations in the Hemisphere. Working across a number of disciplines, fields of research, and institutions, the SSRC has conducted an extensive consultation with leading scholars based in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and in October 2003 convened a two-day planning meeting in New York City. In collaboration with institutional partners and a network of scholars in the Hemisphere, staff is currently developing proposals for a multi-year initiative that will contemplate conferences, training seminars, curriculum development workshops and diverse dissemination strategies.

Today, there is strong evidence for the existence of numerous national, regional and global processes that are both destabilizing and reinforcing longstanding systems of ethnic and racial classification, identification and domination in various parts of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. Demographic changes, the adoption of multicultural discourses and policies by a number of neoliberal states, the existence of the conditions for the emergence of transnational and post-national communities, and the extension of the logic of a capitalist marketplace into the ever-expanding spheres of social life are transforming the social, political and economic arenas within which racial categories, identities, politics and representations are forged. Given their magnitude, these diverse processes warrant the close and concerted attention of scholars to the methodological, thematic and analytic frameworks through which racial formations are currently understood. “Rethinking Race, Rethinking the Americas” seeks to enable such a space in order to promote and enrich innovative scholarship across these boundaries as well as to inform public debates and policy.

While both the richness and breadth of contemporary scholarship on race is the result of the diverse scholarly traditions within which it has developed in various parts of the Americas, it is also the case that there have not been sufficient efforts to integrate the perspectives of scholars working within these specific disciplinary and/or national research communities. In order to work across these numerous divides, we believe that an SSRC initiative in this arena needs to provide a framework which will both enable sustained dialogue between researchers in a number of fields and disciplines throughout the Hemisphere. In this respect, our strategic focus on “the Americas” will serve as a framework that will both enable mechanisms for dialogue and collaboration across often stubborn disciplinary and geographic divides, and also advance the production of critical knowledge and debate on the subject of race. Building on the long and diverse institutional histories of scholarship on African-descended populations in the Hemisphere, on a growing body of work examining indigeneity and mestizaje as historical and contemporary racial formations in Latin America, as well as on a number of rich and dynamic traditions of scholarship on race and racism in the United States within the traditional disciplines as well as in the fields of African-American, Latino, American, Native American and Asian-American Studies, the project would seek to strengthen networks and spaces for dialogue and collaboration among a number of scholarly communities currently engaged in the analysis of historical and contemporary racial formations in the Hemisphere.