Blogs

What is “Whiteness” to Herman Melville?

Hello everyone – at the risk of sounding too much like an English student, I have decided to return way back to our days with The Lima Reader. The reason I risk sounding too much like an English student is that I wish to do this to draw on Herman Melville’s words about Lima. I […]

Reading Blog 6

Wait. Is this fucking play about my family?

Decoding Desire: Reflecting on how Colonialism, Race-Thinking, and Nationalism Have Influenced the Modern Dating Realm

These past two days have been gruelling for many of us who caught what we believe to be a virus, so I will try to muster up a semi-decent blog post. For the second part of the week, we are discussing Modern Inquisitions by Irene Silverblatt. One quote that struck me was from the prologue on page 19: “

Indigeniety and colonialism (reading blog 6)

Back in Cusco we talked about indigeniety and how it is intertwined with colonialism because without colonialism you don’t have indigeniety. With this in mind while I was reading I thought that Silverblatt put it very well when she said that the Spanish “tried to make Indians out of Andeans” and that “Andean Indianness was […]

Mariategui: Feudalism and The Commons

Reading Blog 6

Mariátegui and Fanon

While reading Mariátegui’s “The Problem of the Indian: A New Approach”, I couldn’t help but make connections to Frantz Fanon. Though to be fair I think about Frantz Fanon a lot. While they were writing in quite different contexts, they are both fundamentally concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples and the dismantling systems of exploitation while also confronting the underlying socio-economic and psychological forces that sustain oppression. For Mariátegui, the root cause of Indigenous oppression lies firmly in the inequitable distribution of land and the entrenched power of the…read more

Mariategui and Land

To be honest, economics is neither my area of expertise or area of interest. That being said, Mariategui does a good job of laying out the economic structurings of Peru in a readable and straightforward way. In relation to indigeneity, his main point in Essays on Peruvian Reality is that “the problem of the Indian” […]