Bad Boys and Peaceful Garifuna: Transnational Encounters Between Racial Stereotypes of Honduras and the United States (and Their Implications for the Study of Race in the Americas)

Abstract

Like currency, stereotypes circulate within social life and, like currency, they can he put to use for various purposes by social actors. They involve not simply static images and ideas but mobile representations of selves and others, projected onto someone else or embodied by their targets. Herzfeld urges us to think about stereotypes “not as fixed social categories but as rhetorical images forever in use as the representation of restlessly changing political relations” (1992:70). In thinking about stereotypes it is important not just to consider how they operate within the frames of nationalism and national societies but to analyze how they move across nation-states and how their meanings transform as they settle, albeit restlessly, into specific relations and struggles.

Stereotypes are one of the currencies of social life, They represent long-established prejudices and exclusions and, like nationalist ideology itself they use the terms of social life to exclude others on cultural grounds. They render intimate, and sometimes menacing, the abstraction of otherness. They are thus the building blocks of practical nationalism.

—Michael Herzfeld (1992:72)