Blackface and Racial Scripts at the Andean Fiesta: Staging the Slave Past in the Andes Available to Purchase

Chapter 1, “Blackface and Racial Scripts at the Andean Fiesta: Staging the Slave Past in the Andes,” examines a performance by the Peruvian group Sambos Illimani at the 2013 Fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria, in which they use racial impersonation to commemorate the history of African enslavement in the Andes. It argues that the blackface performance reproduces the racial script of black disappearance as Peru moves away from nationalist regimes of colorblindness toward the recognition of race. It traces the origin of the Danza de Caporales, a neofolkloric dance created in the 1960s, to its predecessor, the controversial Bolivian indigenous blackface dance known as the Tundique, it illuminates how the revolving fictions and fantasies about blackness circulating in the hemispheric fold are levied to construct a slave past and sustain a racial script.