Self Exposures: The Political Arts of Ethnoracial Identification in Latin America and the Caribbean

The papers for this special issue summon the concept of “exposure,” or the act of revealing something hidden before an audience, to understand the performances that animate ethnicity-based social movements across Latin America and the Caribbean. We introduce the phrase “arts of exposure” in order to articulate how social movements big and small are drawing a new politics out of enacting the representations of racial, ethnic, and class identities that have historically been used as tools of repression. The papers in this special issue explore how people use performance to reveal and transform their ethnoracial selves through the categories of difference that have been applied to them. With examples drawn from diverse scenes and encounters across the region, we track the arts of exposure that people mobilize to assert ethnoracial identity and engage reappraisals of their alterity and subjugation. The articles collected here illustrate the ways people are tactically appropriating and recomposing once-constraining norms, formerly othering processes, and seemingly essentialized identities as they face a multitude of governing agents, oppositional forces, and other audiences. Close ethnographic attention reveals the nuanced ways in which these struggles are experienced, contested, and rethought by people on the ground. As we reflect on the implications of studying arts of exposure as topics of analysis, we also ask how thinking about performance across lines of ethnoracial difference can help us reshape our ethnographic practices and writing.