Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Territories, and Cultural Heritage from La Conquista to the Present

Systemic racism is built on historical, structural, and institutionalized dispossessions of minoritized populations such as the Indigenous and the Afro-descendants. These dispossessions, from the first colonial encounters to the present-day, include dispossessions of territories, bodies, and cultural heritage. Dispossession is material and ideological, traceable to an historical conquest, yet marked in the present. To rectify dispossession is to look back and forth, to repair material loss, but also to attend to how historical values and ideologies can hybridize our present, marking it with the cultural inheritance not only of the conquerors but also of the dispossessed. With these premises as points of departure, and with generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, over the last four years I have coordinated and collaborated with a large interdisciplinary group of Penn professors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate research assistants, and with partners (activists, artists, and scholars) from 13 countries in the Americas to document dispossessions and resistances to it. In this lecture, I will present advances of our collective transdisciplinary research and of the public-facing website we aim to launch in fall of 2024.

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Tulia Falleti is the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, Director of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program, and Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Falleti is the author of Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which earned the Donna Lee Van Cott Award to the best book on political institutions by the Latin American Studies Association; and, with Santiago Cunial, of Participation in Social Policy (Elements in the Politics of Development, Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor, with Orfeo Fioretos and Adam Sheingate, of The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2016), and with Emilio Parrado of Latin America Since the Left Turn (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), among other co-edited volumes. Her articles on decentralization, federalism, authoritarianism, participation, and qualitative methods have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Publius, Qualitative Sociology, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics among others. As Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary team, Falleti has been awarded a Just Futures $5 million grant from The Mellon Foundation. Collaborating with partners throughout the Americas, the Penn team is researching “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Cultural Heritage from La Conquista to the Present.” Among other objectives, Falleti is researching the articulation of indigenous peoples’ demands regarding territorial claims, rights to prior consultation, living well, and plurinationality; and collaborating with two non-governmental health organizations to assess the effectiveness of mobile health care for indigenous women and children in remote rural areas.

Co-sponsored by:
Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies
Political Science Department
Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration