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Category: Conviviality and Inequality

This series features selected publications from the MECILA Working Papers that address questions concerning conviviality and inequality from Latin American perspectives. The series collects interdisciplinary contributions from MECILA fellows and alumni and other members of the network connected to the centre. The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (MECILA) focuses on processes of negotiation, legitimation, contestation, and transformation of existing hierarchies as they take place in everyday interactions and within institutions. The historical, environmental, economic, social, and political contexts in which these interactions occur, as well as their representations, are of central relevance.

A green wall in front of a avenue lined by trees and skyscrapers.

Transnational Organized Crime and Hybrid Governance in Latin America. The Case of Forced Disappearance in Mexico

By Marcial A. G. Suarez. The article aims to introduce the concept of hybrid governance as a form of mediation between tri-dimensional political actors: the state; violent non-state actors (VNSAs), and society. Since the 1980s, Latin America has been experiencing the emergence of several VNSAs with governance capacities, originating from distinct factors among which are economic, political, and social crises, as well as intrastate conflicts. We explore the strategies developed in Mexican civil society to confront forced disappearance perpetrated by both organized crime and the state.

A woman wearing a mask is holding a baby.

Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality. The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City

By Raquel Rojas et al. Care seemed to have become one of the most urgent issues of our time amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This empirical analysis focuses on the cases of Argentina, Mexico, and Germany, based on original surveys conducted in the largest city of each country: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Berlin. The analysis shows that different models of care provision translated into heterogeneous levels of support for the population during the crisis. Unequal access to care services determined, to a large extent, the unequal impact of the pandemic and its containment measures on specific social groups.

Two men fighting, wearing jiu-jitsu gear.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness. Embodying Inclusive Conservative Conviviality in Rio de Janeiro

By Raphael Schapira. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) practitioners often perceive their sport as a discrimination-free space, stating: “On the mats, everyone is equal”. However, this belief in equality can sometimes obscure the fact that BJJ has been predominantly associated with Whiteness. This paper explores how the Gracie and Fadda lineages – crucial for the sport’s development – have distinctively constructed BJJ as a White sport, each for their own purposes. Schapira argues that Whiteness and anti-Blackness are constitutive elements linking the appeal of Bolsonaro and neoconservativism with communities typically expected to instead support other political forces more interested in progressive socio-political change.

Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński

By Joanna M. Moszczynska. The paper deals with narrative journalistic texts by Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński about their journeys to the Eastern Bloc and Latin America, respectively, during the first two decades of the Cold War. García Marquez’s crónicas and Kapuściński’s reportages deliver ideas on socialism(s) and engage in affective workings of a travel experience through representations of convivial socialist spaces. By elaborating a philological approach towards socialist affects, the paper concentrates on affective narrative attunements to lived historical moments and aims at comparing both authors as they raise social and political issues pertinent to the conjuncture of the Cold War. The convivial aspect refers here not only to living together with and knowledge production about the Other as represented in the text, but also to the methodological approach with intercultural sensitivity and transregional and transnational awareness of the aesthetic developments in the hybrid field of global literary journalism.

When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy

By Rúrion Melo. The idea of racial democracy, also known as the myth of racial democracy, is not just a mistaken belief. In fact, it encompasses a set of mechanisms that regulate social practices, power relations, forms of social interaction, and collective thinking within a historically established system of ethnic-racial domination. Based on Lélia Gonzalez’s analysis, we will investigate which social actions concretize, support, and at the same time hinder the perception of everyday racism. How can we explain the widespread acceptance and propagation of the myth of racial democracy? And what does the myth of racial democracy hide, apart from what it reveals? The purpose of this text is to understand the paradigmatic issue of Brazilian racial democracy by assuming indirectly the conceptual framework of the relationship between conviviality and inequality. How does conviviality hide inequalities?

The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America

By Ajay Gandhi. This essay uses three kinds of artifacts to frame connections between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, between the 1500s and the present. These items – simultaneously tangible things and symbolic projections – plot a method and chronology of entanglement. The first are precious-metal decorations made in Goa, on India’s western coast, for Portuguese patrons. A second is a 17th-century painting of a young slave from India taken to the Netherlands. The third artifact is the spider’s web, and the Caribbean folk figure of the Anansi spider. Such artifacts can be read through purity and silence, as well as porosity and convergence. In this itinerary of artifacts, we begin with a social imaginary that is determined and untainted, and move to conditions that are fluid and open-ended.