Rift, Rupture and the Temporal Politics of Race in Ecuador: Whiteness and the Narration of Neoliberal Futures During and After the Cenepa War

Abstract

This article explores the implications of emergent neoliberal temporalities for the ongoing temporal marking of Indigenous peoples through an analysis of Ecuadorian white-elite narratives of national futures during and immediately following Ecuador's 1995 Cenepa War with Peru. Specifically, it analyses white-elites' assertion that the war represented a rift with the country's past in order to justify policies that continued to treat Indigenous peoples as alien within the Ecuadorian nation. An examination of this discursive strategy provides critical insight into the role of historical ruptures, whether in the immediate or distant past, for anchoring and legitimating elite claims to the future.The assignment of problematic racial others to temporal spaces marked outside a mythologized national time has been a key facet of white-elite power in many (post) colonial societies. Throughout the Americas, for example, projects of white-elite subjugation and paternalism were undergirded by discourses of liberal nationalism, which situated Indigenous peoples in a pre-national past and posited that only through cultural and racial assimilation could they occupy the present. In order to confront the challenges of recent Indigenous activist claims to coevality, Povinelli (2011) argues that elites have abandoned the present as the favoured temporal space for the Correspondence to: