Gastón Gordillo will provide us with an overview of his forthcoming book Here Comes the Horde: Racial Geographies of the Argentine Multitude. A specter haunts white supremacists worldwide: the image of dark-skinned multitudes on the move, invading, and taking over nations and places imagined and felt as white. In his book, Gordillo analyzes these fears of incoming multitudes to reflect on the affective geographies of white supremacy and especially on the power of the racialized multitudes that challenge them in Argentina. The author interrogates the peculiar type of whiteness that has emerged in Argentina, where national elites devised in the late nineteenth century an ambitious and genocidal project of territorial whitening to make of Argentina “a European nation,” “without Indians” and “without Blacks.” The project was shaped by the struggle against the most feared and powerful figure of a savage horde in this area of South America: el malón, an Indigenous cavalry. The author analyzes how the spatial expansiveness of the racialized poor, and the feeling among the elites and the middle-class that “a malón is coming,” has generated throughout Argentine history recurring anxieties about a besieged whiteness as well as recurring waves of state terror.

This event is organized by Ottawa-ULyon Joint Research Chair on Urban Anthropocene, in collaboration with the Research Centre on the Future of Cities, École urbaine de Lyon, Université Lyon and Investir Avenir.