Dionysian Blacks Sexuality, Body, and Racial Order in Colombia

Bibliographic Data

ID4914646
AuthorsMara Viveros Vigoya (0000-0003-3257-7149, Faculty of Human Sciences of the National University of Colombia, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume29
Issue2
Pages60-77
Publication date2002-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-582X • E-ISSN: 1552-678X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0094582x0202900204
OpenAlexW2048233770
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited2

In Colombia as in the rest of Latin America (Bastide, 1970; Wade, 1997; Muteba Rahier, 1998), the official image of national identity has been developed by the white and mestizo-white elites on the basis of the notion of mestizaje, understood as whitening through racial mixing that makes racial and ethnic diversity invisible. In this context, blackness has not been taken into account as an integral part of a hierarchy in Colombian society that places whiteness at the top and blackness at the bottom. In this article I will describe blackness' as an important element of the national cultural topography and Colombia as a multicultural and pluriethnic nation. In particular, I am interested in exploring the relations between blacks and nonblacks in Colombia through certain very revealing implicit facets of these relations: the imaginaries based on the eroticism and sensuality of black people in which not only nonblacks but also blacks participate in a game of multiple mirrors. Much has been said about whites' fascination with black people and particularly with the eroticism and sensuality of black women. However, there has hardly ever been an examination of black people's views of this stereotype of them as Dionysians-fundamentally interested in sensual pleasure. Do they consider it negative, or do they give it positive value? And, if the latter, is this transformation to be interpreted as a form of resistance or as a reelaboration of racist conceptions? To answer these questions, I will use information from two sources: the preliminary results of an investigation of the black identities of males from middle-class sectors of Quibd6, the capital of Choc6, one of the country's poorest regions and predominantly black, and the analysis of two group interviews2 realized in Bogota with Chocoan males (aged 20-36 years) and

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Diversity (politics) · Element (criminal law) · Eroticism · Ethnic group · Human sexuality · Identity (music) · Multiculturalism · Pleasure · Political science · Racial hierarchy · Racism · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Cultural and political discourse analysis · Gender Studies · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Psychology

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