Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

Archive
CSLS Ringvorlesung "Multilingual Practices in the Digital World"

Voz, multimodalidad y mediación en redes sociales a propósito de la comunidad afroperuana

Wednesday, 2024/04/10, 16:15


Lecture in Spanish (with English translation)

Event organizer: Center for the Study of Language and Society
Speaker: Yvette Bürki
Date: 2024/04/10
Time: 16:15 - 17:45
Locality: F021
Hörraumgebäude Unitobler
Lerchenweg 36
3012 Bern
Registration: via ksl
Characteristics: not open to the public
free of charge

English title:
Voice, multimodality and mediation in social networks in regards to the Afro-Peruvian community

Yvette Bürki is a private lecturer at the Institute of Hispanic Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She researches peripheral varieties of Spanish, in particular Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, as well as discursive semiotic manifestations in relation to ethnic-linguistic minorities, with a focus on identity and ideological manifestations.

Abstract

In this session we will address the analysis of a series of events of citizen resistance as a consequence of a racist painting that appeared one morning on October 5, 2022 on the wall of a main street in the district of Barranco in the Peruvian capital (Lima). Unlike another racist event against this community that occurred a year earlier at a stationery store in the same district and which did receive coverage by the capital's news media, the same did not happen with this racist painting. Instead, social media played a vital role in publicizing the event and the different acts of resistance that took place around this wall in the following days, giving a voice to the Afro-Peruvian community of Barranco. Known as a highly touristic district, Barranco is traditionally one of the Lima districts with the largest Afro-descendant population, an ethnic group that in Peru has been socio-historically stigmatized and also invisibilized, due to its relatively small number compared to other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. Given that the Afro-descendant community does not have a distinct language that identifies and indexes them, it is other modes or submodes such as image, music, textures and color that play an essential role as indexicalizing elements of the ethnic group, as will be shown in the analysis.