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This dissertation examines the racial question in the Chilean context by investigating the historical, symbolic, and material conditions that have sustained the erasure and exclusion of racialized subjects in the national imagination. It introduces the concept of racial technologies to describe the socio-cultural, discursive, and aesthetic mechanisms that have structured racial difference and organized hierarchies of visibility, humanity, and belonging. Drawing from critical race theory, decolonial thought, and aesthetics, the study analyzes how these technologies operate across literary and visual regimes, shaping how race is perceived, denied, and contested in the archive.
The dissertation is organized around three key historical moments and their aesthetic articulations: the colonial period, the post-dictatorial era, and the contemporary present. Each chapter focuses on a distinct cultural artifact—an epic poem (La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla), a documentary-fiction film (El valle de los negros by Richard Salgado), and an essay film (Archipiélago by Pablo Perelman)—to explore how racial difference has been constructed, reproduced, and at times, challenged. These materials are treated not merely as objects of analysis but as interventions into the racial imaginary, each proposing or contesting forms of intelligibility for Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities.
Methodologically, the dissertation combines textual analysis with aesthetic and philosophical reflection, attending to how language, image, and narrative perform racialization. Rather than tracing a linear history of race in Chile, the project foregrounds the fractures, silences, and tensions that shape its engagement with raciality. It argues that race is not marginal or imported, but a constitutive force embedded in Chile’s colonial foundations, republican institutions, and neoliberal present.
By emphasizing aesthetics as both a technology of exclusion and a site of critical possibility, the dissertation opens space to rethink Chile’s racial order beyond dominant narratives of mestizaje or colorblindness. It acknowledges its limitations—especially regarding archival scope and engagement with subaltern epistemologies—while proposing future directions for this critical field. Ultimately, Racial Technologies offers a framework for understanding racialization in Chile as an ongoing process shaping lives, histories, and imaginaries in consequential ways.