Carter examines the anti-Black sentiment in Latin American culture and pays particular attention to how, even in negrista poetry aimed at contributing to the fight against oppression of Black people, Black women are used as a symbol of sensuality and primitiveness. The paper argues that when Black women feature in poetry in the figure of la mulata, they are associated with nature and portrayed as inherently evil, sensual and primitive. Moreover, while representations of Black men evolved to focus on their inner consciousness, rather than on their physical attributes, and to combat oppressive imagery and symbolism, la mulata continued being used as a satire aimed at inviting Afro-Latin communities to take positive steps towards improving their social conditions. They were used to advance a criticism for how the anti-Black sentiment at the heart of popular conceptions of mestizaje ends up being internalized by members of Afro-Latin communities, so that Black women are represented as renouncing Blackness and engaging in a “whitening” process.
Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America
This article analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds of multicultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are adjudicated on the basis of possessing a distinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. It is suggested that one of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that it might lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.
Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality
In this essay, Mariátegui offers an analysis of Peruvian literary practices and a criticism of some of its central figures. He argues that what has been construed as a “national literature” erases the contributions of Indigenous cultures to Peruvian identity, and, in doing so, it partly contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous Peruvians.
The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism
Tarica examines Rosario Castellanos’ Indigenism in her literary work, particularly in her fictional autobiography Balún Canán (The Nine Guardians). Tarica argues that the novel is an examination of the interaction of Castellanos’ mestiza and female identities, and that it concludes with the constitution of an “utterly lonely figure”. Nevertheless, Tarica argues that the inclusion of other protagonists, such as the protagonist’s Mayan nanny, allow for Castellanos to examine the coloniality of power and the appropriation of indigenous identities. According to Tarica, this allows Castellanos to present the protagonist not as a heroine, but as an antiheroine that offers an “absolutely partial version of national events”, and who manages to affirm herself only in “a place of solitary wandering: Uranga’s Nepantla as in-betweenness.
Hidden Figures
The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program.
Reassembling Mathematical Practices: a Philosophical-Anthropological Approach
In this paper we first explore how Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides a conceptual tools to discuss the possibility of the simultaneous existence of culturally different mathematical practices. We will argue that Wittgenstein’s later work will be a fruitful framework to serve as a philosophical background to investigate ethnomathematics (Wittgenstein 1973). We will give an overview of Wittgenstein’s later work which is referred to by many researchers in the field of ethnomathematics. The central philosophical investigation concerns Wittgenstein’s shift to abandoning the essentialist concept of language and therefore denying the existence of a universal language. Languages—or ‘language games’ as Wittgenstein calls them—are immersed in a form of life, in a cultural or social formation and are embedded in the totality of communal activities. This gives rise to the idea of rationality as an invention or as a construct that emerges in specific local contexts. In the second part of the paper we introduce, analyse and compare the mathematical aspects of two activities known as string figure-making and sand drawing, to illustrate Wittgenstein’s ideas. Based on an ethnomathematical comparative analysis, we will argue that there is evidence of invariant and distinguishing features of a mathematical rationality, as expressed in both string figure-making and sand drawing practices, from one society to another. Finally, we suggest that a philosophical-anthropological approach to mathematical practices may allow us to better understand the interrelations between mathematics and cultures. Philosophical investigations may help the reflection on the possibility of culturally determined ethnomathematics, while an anthropological approach, using ethnographical methods, may afford new materials for the analysis of ethnomathematics and its links to the cultural context. This combined approach will help us to better characterize mathematical practices in both sociological and epistemological terms.
Untangling Knots: Embodied Diagramming Practices in Knot Theory
The low visibility and specialised languages of mathematical work pose challenges for the ethnographic study of communication in mathematics, but observation-based study can offer a real-world grounding to questions about the nature of its methods. This paper uses theoretical ideas from linguistic pragmatics to examine how mutual understandings of diagrams are achieved in the course of conference presentations. Presenters use shared knowledge to train others to interpret diagrams in the ways favoured by the community of experts, directing an audience’s attention so as to develop a shared understanding of a diagram’s features and possible manipulations. In this way, expectations about the intentions of others and appeals to knowledge about the manipulation of objects play a part in the development and communication of concepts in mathematical discourse.
Historical Context of the Gender Gap in Mathematics
This chapter is based on the talk that I gave in August 2018 at the ICM in Rio de Janeiro at the panel on The Gender Gap in Mathematical and Natural Sciences from a Historical Perspective. It provides some examples of the challenges and prejudices faced by women mathematicians during last two hundred and fifty years. I make no claim for completeness but hope that the examples will help to shed light on some of the problems many women mathematicians still face today.
Marjorie Rice (16 February 1923–2 July 2017)
Marjorie Jeuck Rice, a most unlikely mathematician, died on 2 July 2017 at the age of 94. She was born on 16 February 1923 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and raised on a tiny farm near Roseburg in southern Oregon. There she attended a one-room country school, and there her scientific interests were awakened and nourished by two excellent teachers who recognized her talent. She later wrote, ‘Arithmetic was easy and I liked to discover the reasons behind the methods we used.… I was interested in the colors, patterns, and designs of nature and dreamed of becoming an artist’?
Mathematicians Writing for Mathematicians
We present a case study of how mathematicians write for mathematicians. We have conducted interviews with two research mathematicians, the talented PhD student Adam and his experienced supervisor Thomas, about a research paper they wrote together. Over the course of 2 years, Adam and Thomas revised Adam’s very detailed first draft. At the beginning of this collaboration, Adam was very knowledgeable about the subject of the paper and had good presentational skills but, as a new PhD student, did not yet have experience writing research papers for mathematicians. Thus, one main purpose of revising the paper was to make it take into account the intended audience. For this reason, the changes made to the initial draft and the authors’ purpose in making them provide a window for viewing how mathematicians write for mathematicians. We examined how their paper attracts the interest of the reader and prepares their proofs for validation by the reader. Among other findings, we found that their paper prepares the proofs for two types of validation that the reader can easily switch between.