Whiteness in Political Rhetoric: A Discourse Analysis of Peruvian Racial-Nationalist “Othering”

Abstract

Drawing upon Paulo Drinot's works on how racialized assumptions have been central to the transition toward industrialization, and neoliberalism in early 20th-, and early 21st-century Peru, respectively, this monograph analyses how contemporary powerful state agents efficiently naturalize whiteness among Peruvians by equating it with progress and constructing the non-core group as a racialized “Other”, in and through the articulation of language and meaning. I claim that direct, naked, and offensive anticommunist and anti-indigenous language is not the only, or the most efficient, way in which an antagonism is constructed in contemporary Peru. By understanding how whiteness operates in political rhetoric, we will be able to visualize more clearly how even the most common, widely accepted, and allegedly inoffensive expressions can be effective in the construction of racial antagonisms. In order to accomplish these objectives and support these claims, I will engage Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of discourse.