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PLEASE FORWARD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT TO
YOUR STUDENTS AND COLLEAGUES
The Black Cities Lab at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research, along with the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, present
The Limits and Possibilities of Multicultural Politics in the 21st Century American Polity
Book Talks by
Roosbelinda Cárdenas González
&
Tathagatan Ravindran
Friday, November 21st, 2025
12:00 - 2:00 pm
Wallis Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315)
Lunch will be served
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Raising Two Fists: Struggles for Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia (Stanford University press, 2024) is a historically grounded ethnography of Afro-Colombian political mobilization after the multicultural turn that swept Latin America in the 1990s, when states began to recognize and legally enshrine rights for Afro-descendants. Roosbelinda Cárdenas explores three major strategies that Afro-Colombians developed in their struggles against racialized dispossession—the defense of culturally specific livelihoods through the creation of Black Territories; the demand for differential reparations for Afro-Colombian war victims; and the fight for inclusion in Colombia’s peace negotiations and post-conflict rebuilding—illustrating how they engage in this work both as participants of organized political movements and in their everyday lives. Although rights-based claims to the state have become necessary and pragmatic tools in the intersecting struggles for racial, economic, and social justice, Cárdenas argues that they continue to be ineffective due to Colombia’s entrenched colonial racial hierarchies. She shows that while Afro-Colombians pursue rights-based claims, they also forge African Diasporic solidarities and protect the flourishing of their lives outside of the frame of rights, with or without the state’s sanction—a “two-fisted” strategy for Black citizenship.
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The Social Life of Indianism (University of Texas Press, 2025) offers a fresh perspective by examining Bolivian Indigenous politics through the lens of political ideology. Through an ethnographic study of Indianism in the city of El Alto, Tathagatan Ravindran shows how canonical Indianism—the original ideology that rejects Bolivia as enslaver of the Indian nation—provided philosophical ballast for exponents of a more popular folk Indianism that accommodates the Bolivian state and pursues Indigenous empowerment within it. Synthesizing approaches from several disciplines, Ravindran demonstrates how canonical Indianism was not refuted or supplanted; it refracted, in the broader public, into a new common sense. A sophisticated analysis of a complex political landscape, The Social Life of Indianism brings much-needed nuance to one of the most prominent forms of Indigenous ideology and offers a unique framework for analyzing political ideologies across the contemporary world.
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Roosbelinda Cárdenas González is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research examines how histories of postcolonial racial formations shape contemporary struggles over citizenship, national belonging, and social justice in Latin America. A politically engaged scholar, Dr. Cárdenas produces research intended to inform and advance movements for social change. Her work has appeared in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana, Social Studies of Science, and The Journal of Peasant Studies, as well as in public venues such as NACLA, MERIP, and The Nation. Her 2024 book, Raising Two Fists: Struggles for Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia, is based on more than two decades of ethnographic research on Black antiracist organizing in Colombia.
Tathagatan Ravindran is an anthropologist with research specializations in race and ethnicity, political anthropology, social movements, anti-racist education, and activist research methods. He is currently the Director of Epistemic Justice and Laboratory of Data at the Baobab Center for Innovation in Ethno-racial, Gender, and Environmental Justice in Colombia and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) in the University of Guadalajara. He has done extensive research in Bolivia and Colombia. His book entitled The Social Life of Indianism: Politics and Indigeneity in 21st Century Bolivia was published by the University of Texas Press. His research has been funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and National Science Foundation.
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