The limits of a paradigm: Jean Muteba Rahier, ‘The settler colonial studies paradigm as a discursive reaffirmation of the preeminence of Indigeneity in the field of ethnoracial alterity in the Andean sub-region’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies’, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The limits of a paradigm: Jean Muteba Rahier, ‘The settler colonial studies paradigm as a discursive reaffirmation of the preeminence of Indigeneity in the field of ethnoracial alterity in the Andean sub-region’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies’, 2026

19Oct26

Abstract: This article critically assesses the analytical utility of the Settler Colonial Studies (SCS) paradigm to make sense of sociopolitical realities in the Andean sub-region. It contends that the foundational ‘settler-Indigenous’ binary of SCS – predicated on Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’ – reproduces a long-standing discursive tradition in the sub-region that grants Indigeneity a position of preeminence while marginalizing the specific trajectories and experiences of Afrodescendants and others. By uncovering the ‘microphysics’ of this ethnoracial hierarchy from colonial law to contemporary multiculturalism, I intend to illustrate how the ‘ideological biology of national identity’ in countries like Ecuador has historically integrated the Indigenous subject as a symbolic ancestral root while treating Blackness as an external, disposable, and excluded presence. Through ethnographic data from the Ecuadorian Province of Esmeraldas, an overview of Indigenismo in Ecuador, and an appreciation of the work done on the ‘Indianization’ of Afrodescendant legal claims in the Inter-American System, the essay argues that the SCS paradigm’s amalgamation of Blackness and Indigeneity ends up sustaining colonial hierarchies. Ultimately, I call for a ‘multiversal’ or pluriversal horizontalism that rejects the primacy of any single identification in favor of an equitable, non-hierarchical coalition of truly equal partners.

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