Editor’s Letter
Journal: Public Culture
Year: 2019

Our issue opens with a reflection on racist motifs at festivals and parades throughout Colombia. Melissa Valle ties the presence of characters that mirror “Mammy” and “Jezebel” archetypes and evoke the primitive African to the globally circulating racial imagination. As local narratives meet global representations, these subservient, sexualized, and animalistic representations make race legible. Resisting what many US scholars of Latin America are accused of — “mistranslating critique into trave