Abstract

PAZOS CARDENAS, Mateo. White Men in Black Lands. Racial Phallotopies in Colombia’s Southern Pacific. Tabula Rasa [online]. 2023, n.45, pp.193-215.  Epub Aug 16, 2022. ISSN 1794-2489.  https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n45.09.

This article advances several theoretical reflections on some “White” men’s experiences in Colombia’s southern Pacific, a region with prevailing presence of Black/Afro-Colombian populations. To do that, I will analyze two “White” men groups present in the region: Firstly, White men come to the southern Pacific to carry out projects pertaining to the State and/or non-governmental organizations; secondly, White men inhabiting the territory to perform activities related to (il)legal violence and the armed conflict. These experiences are analyzed under the notion by anthropologist Rodrigo Parrini “phallotopies” —contradictory and contingent power networks, through which men take over physical and symbolic spaces imposing life styles through violence. This article is built through an ethnographic fieldwork carried out from 2019 in Colombia’s southern Pacific region. The analysis of these men’s different experiences helps us to catch a glimpse of how the links between gender and Colombian nation-state’s structural racism deploy themselves in different violent ways.

Keywords : whiteness; Afro-Colombia; racism; gender; masculinities.

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