Afrodescendants, racialization and policies of sensibilities in Argentina

Abstract

This article examines some connections between sensibilities policies and racialization practices. Taking the problem of afrodescendants in Argentina as a study case, the general purpose is to discuss about sensibilities, understood as structures of feeling that translate the plots of social domination into everyday life. From this perspective, we analyze how the sensibilities intercede in the racialization practices that accompany and make possible the capitalist development in their neo-colonial aspirations. This theoretical position implies considering that sensibilities regulate, among other aspects, racialized ways of observing / feeling / perceiving the world that subjects have, and that they are radically put into play in intercultural contexts.To achieve this objective, first, the theoretical-epistemic approach that guides the analysis is presented, discussing a set of analytical inflections that connect the practices of racialization with the policies of sensibilities. Then, based on a documentary-bibliographic analysis, the racial and social classifications operating in Argentina are explored, investigating the subalternity processes configured around the figure of the "black" from the emergence of the Nation State until today. We conclude that the “categorical manichaeism” prevailing in racial classifications, and the "negrification" of the subaltern world that has been consolidated since the mid-twentieth century, makes the discussion on interculturality relevant as an epistemic problem and political project.