Latin American and Caribbean theorists of the 20th century have characterized the ongoing systems of social order and knowledge production engendered by European colonialism across the American hemisphere as coloniality. In this talk, Tiffany C. Fryer brings this scholarship on coloniality into conversation with the analytic of settler colonialism which has more readily been applied to the colonial afterlives of Anglophone contexts. By presenting the findings of a community-centered archaeological research initiative from the Yucatan Peninsula, Fryer shows how we might also productively characterize the region as settler colonial. She argues that by reorienting our characterization of Yucatan's colonial condition as settler colonial rather than post-colonial we can better understand the origins and afterlives of conflicts like the Caste War of Yucatan, which entirely reorganizes the social geographies of the peninsula from the mid-19th century onwards.

ABOUT OUR PRESENTER:
Tiffany C. Fryer is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton where she also lectures in the Department of Anthropology and Humanities Council. She is an interdisciplinary scholar examining the intricacies of political violence, collective memory, and race and indigeneity in the Americas. Her ongoing research project is based in Quintana Roo, Mexico where she helps to facilitate a community heritage initiative (the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project) with a focus on histories of the 18th through 20th centuries. Fryer holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a MA and BA from Stanford University. Her work has been supported by various organizations including the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Moderator: Gabriela Nouzeilles, PLAS, Princeton University

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