Paulina Alberto, University of Michigan

Paula Alberto is the author of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) and co-editor, with Eduardo Elena, of Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Ideas about race are always a set of narratives about who people are and are not. Sometimes these narratives take the form of classic stories with fixed characters, plots, and morals, and are passed on across generations and in multiple genres. The stories surrounding “el Negro Raúl,” an Afro-Argentine man who rose to fame in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, illuminate the special power of narrative to shape racial attitudes. Raúl’s life and semi-fictional afterlives, which commentators construed as oddities in a homogeneously white nation, also shed light on the construction and meanings of dominant racial ideologies in Argentina since the early 1900s.