Mergenthaler 366

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies & the Department of Political Science present

Indigenous Sovereignty and The Construction Of Citizenship During Peru’s Post-independence Period

A lecture by Dr. Arturo Chang, Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto

in conversation with Alonso Burgos, PhD Student in the Department of Sociology, JHU

During the Age of Revolutions (c.1775-1830) people living in the Americas witnessed the emergence of hemispheric republicanism as a tool for dismantling colonial powers in the region. From the United States to Argentina, Pan-American discourses centered on shared experiences of subjection, popular sovereignty, and the novel conditions of the New World to envision varied conceptions of postcolonial emancipation. This chapter situates this discursive and political phenomenon from the other side of the same coin. Namely, as a potentially assimilationist and regulatory enterprise which both adopted and problematized its links to imperial power. I suggest that this facet of hemispheric republicanism is most apparent in the nineteenth-century Andes, where Indigenous communities held longstanding avenues for making sovereign claims on material, social, and landed interest, which in turn led them to reject the project of Pan-American emancipation. As such, this chapter contends that studies of Andean republicanism must account for the convergence and contention of Indigenous, American, and nationalized citizenship as competing postcolonial standpoints, as well as their precarious reconciliation in the nation-building project. 

Arturo Chang is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Political Science at Williams College. His research focuses on Postcolonial Thought, Decolonial Politics, and Comparative Political Theory. Within these areas he centers on Indigenous studies, revolutionary movements, nation-building, as well as race and ethnicity in the Americas. He is currently working on his book, ‘New World’ Nation-Building: Hemispheric Revolution and the Postcolonial Dimensions of American Political Thought. The book examines the importance of hemispheric vernaculars among Indigenous, Black, and Mestizo revolutionaries conceptualizing nation-building projects throughout the Americas.