UPDATE: Unfortunately, this talk was canceled due to unforeseen circumstances.

Please join us in Rosenwald 301 on Friday, May 3 at 3:30 PM for the next LVC meeting of the Spring Quarter! Prof. Benjamin Smith will be presenting a talk on the intersection of race, language, and gaming among young men in southern Peru.

Getting Ahead While Falling Behind: Peer Socialization and the Paradoxes of Race in Southern Peruvian Digital Gaming

A new manner of encountering the global order has become salient in the urban areas of Southern Peru over the past fifteen years: practices of digital gaming in which young men play games in teams with players from around the world. This is an order that these young men find to be deeply stratified around faultlines of race and nation, faultlines that imagine “Indians” and “Peruvians” as incapable and disorderly gamers. Drawing on analyses of video recordings of digital gaming, this talk describes how a group of young men – in moments of heightened peer solidarity – navigate this stratified field through the use of a set of racist epithets. The analysis reveals these moments to be paradoxical ones: these young men work to craft or socialize themselves into more skillful and less racialized forms of play, while at the same time they sense that this project of socialization – a project of attempted de-racialization – is always incomplete and reversible.