Fakultät I

Nowadays when the notion of “race” is decisively abandoned as scientifically inviable, the popularity of the concept of mestizaje reminds us of a deep influence of “racial” component on social imagination, especially in the contexts of identity quest (Tilley 2005). The metaphor of mestizaje is undoubtedly the most distinctive and the most impactful narrative metaphor (Zinken at al. 2008) in discourses on national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean of the 20th century. It was used to measure cultural peculiarity of “our America” (Martí 1891) and to fashion the notion of „racial“ homogeneity – contrary to the idea of „racial“ division typical for the scholarly work of the 19th century – in ethnically very diverse contexts.

The project reconstructs a network of discursive engagements with mestizaje in selected essays of outstanding Hispanic American intellectuals beginning with the first half of the 20th century and beyond. Selected works are regarded, in line with Kutzinski (1993), as “modulations of discourses that are historically tied to specific economic and political group interests”. The examination of reciprocity between various visions of mestizaje, conceptual and discursive effects and image patterns that at different points of this century seek to articulate self-definition of Latin America is important to answer the questions concerning the circulation and rhetorical reproduction of the concept of mestizaje within the postcolonial space until our time, beyond national and continental confines, as well as the questions of its ideological charge and social categorizations. In this respect, a particular attention will be given to Mexican-Antillean interconnections as well as to contributions from Central America.

From a discourse-analytical perspective, the central interest is to outline how metaphors contribute or fail to overcome the “racialized” way to see, to imagine and to represent postcolonial Latin American societies. A particular attention will be given to the extent to which metaphoric, referentialist language of apparently progressive discourses on ethnic mixture masks an undercurrent of racial essentialism and invokes racist stereotypes.

From a cognitive-semantic perspective, this study is a contribution to understanding the impact of cognitive conceptualizations such as metaphors on the communication about “racial” issues in a postcolonial and postnational era.

The project 1) departs from the writings by José Vasconcelos, “the man responsible for bringing together many of the most important architects, intellectuals, and artists of the post-armed, cultural-nationalist phase of the revolution” (Hedrick 2003). His La raza cósmica (1925) was the foundational essay of the modern discourse on mestizaje. Its enormous cognitive appeal throughout and beyond the continent is, however, hardly explored (cf. Casáus Arzú 2008). The project focuses the interrelationship between multivoiced appropriations of mestizaje, e.g. its culinary, biological, musical and other manifestations and replacements in influential essays of the time by Arguedas, Carrión, Cuadra, García, Henríquez Ureña, Masferrer Mónico, Guillén, Ortiz, Reyes, Rojas, Wyld Ospina among others.

2) The project also traces how new conceptualizations of Latin America were made visible on the international level, in the USA in particular, for example, by means of univesity lectures and contributions in the press.

Abgeschlossene Forschungsprojekte

"Mestiz*innen und Métissage: koloniale Konzepte in globaler Perspektive” (University of Cologne, MECILA)

Edition and linguistic analysis of L’Histoire naturelle des Indes (“Drake manuscript”, ab. 1600), in collaboration with the FAU Erlangen (Prof. Dr. Silke Jansen), Morgan Library New York)

“METAPRES. El discurso metalingüístico en la prensa española” (University of Göttingen)

“Multilingualism from a constructive perspective” (FAU Erlangen)

“Hispania Submersa –Spanish heritage of the Caribbean” (University of Mainz/ University of Erlangen; funded by the German Research Foundation; project supervisor Jun.-Prof. Dr. Silke Jansen)

Aktualisiert via XIMS am 20.2.2025 von A. Klimenkowa-Krohner