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Los factores cubanos de la humanidad: A Note on the Analytics of Fernando Ortiz’s El engaño de las razas (1946)

Wed, May 27, 6:00 to 7:45pm, TBA

Abstract

Ostensibly a book written with a view towards publicly promulgating an anti-racist agenda by synthesizing a vast body of mid-twentieth century biological and genetic science, Ortiz’ El engaño de las razas remains one his least commented-upon works. Eclipsed in its scholarly reception (both nationally and internationally) by its immediate predecessor El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) and its English translation (1946), El engaño de las razas also appears to have been shadowed by (or simply assimilated into) the spate of post-World War II anthropological anti-racist pronouncements culminating in the 1951 UNESCO Declaration Against Racism. However, paying close attention to Ortiz analytical and rhetorical strategies reals that El engaño is by no means a mere anti-racist tract in the guise of a (characteristically learned and vociferously poetic) Latin American ensayo. As I will argue, if the text merits our attention today, it is not only because it refracts and subjects a larger, international anthropological agenda of the time to a local perspective, but because its analytical tropology – arguably – only (re-)entered the mainstream of Anthropological theorizing about human biology, heredity, and sociality from the 1990s onward.

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