Researching entangled inequalities in Latin America: the role of historical, social, and transregional interdependencies

Abstract

Social inequalities have conventionally been researched as synchronous processes within the frame of national borders and articulated in the concept of class. This means that established scholarship has not adequately considered the historical dimensions and global entanglements or interconnections between class and other social classifications that have shaped existing inequalities. Starting from world system and postcolonial theories as well as from recent debates on transnationalism, the paper first presents a set of resources for overcoming current deficits in the research of inequalities. In order to illustrate how these resources analytically operate, the second part of the paper discusses the case of social inequalities which affect Afrodescendants in Latin America.