Justice in All Black (Ep. 2): Erika Edwards on Black Women in ArgentinaErika Edwards discusses her Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic, published this year.
Second Episode of Justice in All Black, podcast of UNC Charlotte's Africana Studies Department.
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Erika Edwards Hiding in Plain Sight, Oct. 1 2020 GVSU
#Slaveryarchive Book Club: Hiding in Plain Sight by Erika Edwards
Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic11 February 2021, LAC History Seminar Series
Speakers: Erika Denise Edwards, University of North Caroline at Charlotte, in conversation with Celso Thomas Castilho, Vanderbilt University
Greer Lecture 2020: Hiding in Plain SightOn October 6, 2020, as part of the Annual Greer Lecture on Latin American History, over 70 attendees learned about Professor Erika Denise Edwards' research findings in her latest book "Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women the Law and the Making of a White Argentine Republic." Her presentation focused on Black and African descended women who actively partook in the construction of racial identities during the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Cordoba.
Afro-Argentines, Anti-Blackness and Argentina's National Identity — A Talk by Erika EdwardsThis talk by historian Erika Edwards was hosted by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Andean Cultures and Histories Working Group, and the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University on January 26, 2021 as part of Afro-Latin America: Representation, Politics, History, a series of lectures and conversations in the Winter and Spring of 2021.
"No hay negros en Argentina!" is a common phrase used to explain Argentina’s lack of a Black population. However, the word “negro” is a popular label used to affectionately describe loved ones or negatively reference the poor. Whether used as a term of endearment or of offense, “negro” applies to anyone who physically does not fit Argentina’s definition of whiteness. In this presentation, historian Erika Edwards delves into the racialization of blackness and the making of a national identity, examining Argentina’s black history, the legacy of abolition, and the manifestation of anti-blackness.
Erika Edwards is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (2020), which won the 2020 Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods-Brown Memorial Book Prize and was named one of the best books of 2020 by the African American Intellectual History Society. The book — the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods — traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by re-categorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late 18th century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the 19th century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.
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Presentación de libro: “Hiding in Plain Sight”[En español] En esta ocasión nos acompañarán las Dras. Erika Denise Edwards y Liz Moreno Chuquen en la presentación del libro: Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic.
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No Longer a Racial Democracy: Critical Whiteness in Latin America and the CaribbeanAfroLatinx Voices Series
Black activists and academics across the disciplines have long known Latin America and the Caribbean to be far from a racial paradise. However, the region continues to hold a global perception as a racial democracy, on the basis of national narratives of a congenial race mixture that makes "race" itself appear to be an obsolete category for critique. Reinforced by revisionist histories manifested by the state, popular culture, and everyday discourse, whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean is characterized in these narratives as more benevolent than its North American iterations. This cultural and biological mixture between people of European, Africans, and Native descent is often described as mutually constructive, benign, and even loving, allowing for the continued dismissal of whiteness as a structure and lived experience circumscribed by a complex system of privileges rigged against Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples in the region.
In the fourth and final event of the AfroLatinx Voices series, we bring together three interdisciplinary Black studies scholars to discuss how their work contributes to the burgeoning field of critical whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Erika Denise Edwards is an associate professor of Latin American History at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of the recent book "Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic."
Isar Godreau is a researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. She is the author of "Arrancando mitos de raíz: guía para la enseñanza antirracista de la herencia africana en Puerto Rico" and "Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico."
Patricia de Santana Pinho is a Brazilian social scientist and associate professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of “Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia” and "Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil."
Moderator: John Mundell is a Ph.D. candidate in African American & African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the Blackness in Latin America Working Group. His research analyzes racial democracy, race, sexuality, and popular culture in Brazil and the Atlantic world.
Presented by the Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group, and cosponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, the Departments of African American Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, English, Comparative Literature, Ethnic Studies, and Spanish & Portuguese, as well as Professor Nadia Ellis and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.