Afro Argentina

The historically dominant narrative conceived by the Argentinian nation-state presents the country as predominantly white, with European roots, excluding any reference to Africa in the construction of its identity. Based on the idea of an opposition between civilization and barbarism, colonial mechanisms were designed and continuously reasserted in an attempt to render blackness invisible and systematically suppress its existence over the country’s 200-year history. Even in books and population censuses, any racial reference to blacks or mestizos was gradually and orderly eliminated so as not to “taint” the country’s allegedly uniform composition.

Afroargentina does not attempt to make Afro-Argentinians visible by exoticizing otherness. It proposes the opposite: to reconsider our black roots by questioning the privileged white gaze that views them as an exotic “other,” based on a historical revision of the nation’s construction, providing a glimpse of systematic processes of the acculturation of blacks throughout history. it tries to ponder upon the white interpretation of blackness by wondering at the privilege of the white look which proposes it. It begins with the historic revisionism of national construction and shows the systematic processes of Afrodescendants assimilation throughout history.

Structural racism and the deconstruction of the non-existence of blackness in the Argentine context are some of the arguments and ideas through from a context of class, race and gender privilege.

– In collaboration with DIAFAR-