Federico Navarrete Linares's book offers the reader a comparative evaluation of knowledge/power systems as well as biopolitical strategies put in place by colonial regimes and utilized by state actors (from the sixteenth century to the present) initially to incorporate indigenous and Afro-mestizo peoples into European empires and subsequently to construct racial difference as the basis for discrimination, exclusion, or integration in American nation-states. In the first of two essays, Navarrete Linares convincingly argues that theories of cultural change have been systems of knowledge production about indigenous peoples created in the interest of establishing their subordination. Navarrete Linares provides an intellectual history of colonial theories of Christianization; positivist theories of acculturation, mestizaje, and indigenismo; and contemporary theories of resistance, hybridity, and multiculturalism—all of which, he argues, are predicated on their authors' teleological assumptions that indigenous peoples must and will transform their authentic modes of identity to fit European or...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
