Affirmative action(ing)s and postneoliberal movement in South America and Ecuador

Abstract

In South America, a region with one of the highest levels of racial and income inequality in the world, race-based affirmative action is newly visible and forcefully emergent. This text explores affirmative action’s manifestation, conceptualization, and expression most especially in the region’s progressive states, in governments that purport to break with neoliberalism and construct different social, political, and economic orders. Its concern is, on the one hand, with new constitutions, legislation, and public policy that address centuries of invisibility, negation, and socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and political exclusion and, on the other, with the plurality in which affirmation action is being postured and conceived beyond the policy realm, including as “acts” and “actions” of cultural and decolonial affirmation. Ecuador serves as the case example. The article asks, what kind of affirmative action(s), conceived by whom, and for what, and with what political, social, cultural, and civilizational project and life vision? And it queries about what it might mean to think affirmative action as affirming interventions and decolonial “actionings”—engendered not just from “above” but also from “below”—as component parts of a social political project of intervention, decolonization, transformation, and of construction toward horizons of co-existence, humanity, life, and civilization otherwise.