Blackness in the Andes: Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism (original) (raw)

Ecuadorian Blackness

This study analyses Adalberto Ortiz’s novel Juyungo (1943) and proposes that, in Juyungo, Ortiz succeeds in articulating an Ecuadorian Blackness by recuperating the legacy of resistance and solidarity of the multi-ethnic and multiracial community of Esmeraldas. The novel’s protagonist, Ascension Lastre, also known as “Juyungo”, represents both the ancestral ties that have characterised the common experiences of Afro-descendants and indigenous communities in the region as well as the complex position both communities have occupied as part of the cultural, political, and economic project of the Ecuadorian nation.

Race in the Andes: global movements and popular ontologies

Bulletin of Latin American …, 1998

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Afro and Indigenous Life-Visions in/and Politics. (De)colonial Perspectives in Bolivia and Ecuador

Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos, 2011

Ancestral cosmologies or “life visions” are increasingly visible today, both within the realm of Afro and Indigenous community-based struggles, and within the frame of State constitutions, rights, and politics. This article looks at what happens when ancestral life–visions are positioned as central principles of State and of State politics and public policies. Can these philosophies, rationalities and logics otherwise guide the remaking or re–founding of society and State, and how, particularly when the authority, organization, and practice of politics and State remain bound to Western frames and capitalist interests?Hoy día, las cosmologías o “visiones ancestrales de la vida” son cada vez más visibles tanto dentro del mundo de las luchas comunitarias Afro e indígenas, como dentro del marco de las constituciones políticas del Estado, de los derechos y de la política. Este artículo examina lo que sucede cuando las “visiones ancestrales de la vida” se convierten en principios centrale...

AMST 470/AFST 406/LAS 450 - Blatinx: Black Identities in Latin America

This course interrogates the problem of Blackness in Latin America. While it is indisputable that Iberian America participated in the transatlantic slave trade, receiving some 90% of all Africans transported in the Middle Passage, locating Black identity amongst their descendants is more challenging. This is because the predominant identitarian notion of Blackness emerged historically in Anglo American contexts, particularly the United States. While idealized notions of White racial purity in the United States catalyzed an all-encompassing Black category as the site of Whiteness’ exclusion, idealizations in discourse and representation of mestizaje in Latin America have worked against the emergence of a strong racial identity in favor of national identity, masking the materiality of the Black presence within these national-cultural formations. Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole. Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.

Blackness in Mestizo America: The Cases of Mexico and Peru

2009

Since the late 1980s, there has been an explosion in diaspora studies across the globe, giving rise to debates within this nascent field of inquiry (Brubaker 2005). Diaspora scholars are struggling to address the complicated questions of how to define the diaspora, how to understand the diasporic experience, and whether or not we can speak about such an experience in any unifying sense.