Sebastián López Vergara

I am a scholar of race, colonialism, and Indigeneity in modern Latin America culture (20th and 21st century). I teach courses on Latin American Indigenous studies, Latin American and Caribbean cultural and critical theory, Latin American cinema, race and racial formation, comparative colonialisms, and migration.

My book project, titled The Surveillance of Dispossession: Race, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in Twentieth Century Chile, is a study on race, the surveillance of the Mapuche and Selk’nam peoples, and colonialism in twentieth century Chile. It sits at the intersections of hemispheric Indigenous studies and critical ethnic studies to propose a theory of race that accounts for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of the late nineteenth century Chilean colonization of their ancestral homelands. Drawing from critical surveillance studies, Black studies, and critical theory, my project brings together different anthropological archives to present an unexplored genealogy of the surveillance of Indigenous peoples and their territories. It argues that anthropological representation of the Mapuche and Selk’nam created surveillance discourses based on the observation and representation of the quotidian lives of Indigenous peoples to further constrain and manage their lives and ancestral lands. It shows how social scientific surveillance performed a simultaneous and differentiated role for each Indigenous population: it racialized the Mapuche and Selk’nam in order to reproduce the dispossession of their lands and organizations of life. Placing these racial processes as central dynamics of Chilean national modernity, the book observes how the Mapuche people were racialized through discourses of inclusion and the Selk’nam through discourses of extinction. In this way, my project also shows how distinct racial formations on Indigenous populations throughout the twentieth century incessantly created the conditions for the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lives through the discontinuities, incoherences, and endurances of these discursive racial conceits.

Recently Taught Courses

SPN 410/532: Cine y teoría latinoamericana.
HUS 150: Indigenous Cultures of Latin America.
SPN 415/510: Capital, opresión y conflicto en teoría crítica latinoamericana y caribeña.
SPN 612: (PhD Seminar) Culturas del despojo.