Round Tables > Sociology

RACE, IDENTITY AND CONFLICTUALITY IN THE AMERICAS

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2:45pm-4:45pm

Centre de Colloques, room 5

Organization : Lora Labarère (LISST – Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), Sébastien Roux (LISST – CNRS)

Speakers : Sarah Abel (University of Cambridge), Audrey Célestine (CERAPS – Université de Lille), Alfonsina Faya Robles (CERPOP)

Presentation : This round table proposes to question how contemporary sociology deals with racial identification and assignment in the Americas today – a phenomenon captured through fears and identity-based anxieties that oppose and divide collectives and communities. Today, race seems to fracture societies and weaken their unity; it is a question that has imposed itself to all of us, including those who would rather not think about it – it is a shared “anxiety” across the diversity of the Americas. Racial fears can be expressed in violent ways: for instance, « culture wars » and threats of « a new civil war » in the United States; the rise of supremacist movements in Brazil; the radicalization of indigenist revendications in Latin America; political tensions in the Caribbean... More subtly, the omnipresence of race is also expressed through new practices that question the way in which individuals think of themselves: the massive turn to DNA testing which offers each person the possibility of identifying his/her ancestry on the basis of « bio-geographical race-ascendance»; the multiplication of folklorist manifestations and "cultural" networks; the judicialization of community reparation demands to claim a history and be part of a filiation... Today race appears as a joint vector of unification and division, organizing both affiliations and oppositions. An omnipresent issue, it is at the center of the identifications and the new conflicts it generates.

To reflect upon the Americas is also to question the way in which the Americans see themselves. Together, we will ask how and why American societies experience the racial question today with such acuity and what are its effects in the (conflictual) making of contemporary identities.

With the support of LISST UMR 5193