The Peruvian minstrel: an analysis of the representations of blackness in the performance of <em>El Negro Mama</em> from 1995 to 2016

• Main Author: Mosquera Rosado, Ana Lucía
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2019
• Subjects: media representation; Afro-Peruvian population; racial stereotypes; racist discourse; media studies; African American Studies; Latin American Studies; Mass Communication
• Online Access: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7861; https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9058&amp;context=etd

Peruvian mass media has failed in addressing and representing the cultural and ethnic diversity of its country, as the presence and representation of ethnic minorities (indigenous and Afro-Peruvian) are almost exclusively reduced to the reproduction of stereotypes in comedy shows, in which they are often racialized and the target of offenses directly related with their ethnic identities. The analysis will focus on the figure of El Negro Mama, a very popular character in Peruvian television thought to be a portrait of the Afro-Peruvian population. Through the use of textual analysis, the paper will explore of this character in order to determine the performativity of blackness in national television and the use of racist discourses in the national media and their direct relation with the reproduction of stereotypes and racist language. The research, then, seeks to provide an analysis of the transformation of the discourses that this character produced to show the variations of the racist discourse affecting this ethnic group and the transformation of the portrayals and interactions of the character when publicly rejected by the Afro-Peruvian civil society.