1st Edition

Rewriting the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean Beyond Disciplinary and National Boundaries

Edited By Robert Adams Jr. Copyright 2013
    184 Pages
    by Routledge

    184 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume considers the African Diaspora through the underexplored Afro-Latino experience in the Caribbean and South America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches such as feminism and Atlantic studies, the authors explore the production of historical and contemporary identities and cultural practices within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.

    Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America illustrates how far the fields of Afro-Latino and African Diaspora studies have advanced beyond the Herskovits and Frazier debates of the 1940s. The book’s arguments complicate Herskovits’ insistence on Black culture being an exclusive reflection of African survivals, as well as Frazier’s counter-claim of African American culture being a result of slavery and colonialism. This collection of thought-provoking essays extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Latinos are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora.

    Foreword Fassil Demissie

    1. Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America: beyond disciplinary and national boundaries Robert Lee Adams Jr

    2. An analysis of the role of the study of the African Diaspora within the field of Atlantic history Nathaniel Millett

    3. Comparison and connection in the study of Afro-Latin America Mark Anderson

    4. Africans, Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Portuguese in the Iberian Inquisition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Vanicléia Silva Santos

    5. ‘Political changüí’: race, political culture, and black civic activism in the early Cuban republic Melina Pappademos

    6. Bongó Itá: leopard society music and language in West Africa, Western Cuba, and New York City Ivor L. Miller

    7. El Puente: transnationalism among Cubans of English-speaking Caribbean descent Andrea Queeley

    8. Constructing and promoting African Diaspora identity in the Dominican Republic: the emergence of Casa de la Identidad de las Mujeres Afro Kimberly Eison Simmons

    9. State violence and the ethnographic encounter: feminist research and racial embodiment Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

    10. The road ahead in Afro-Latino Studies: restless conclusions Robert Lee Adams Jr

    Biography

    Robert Lee Adams Jr, Ph.D. is an independent researcher and consultant. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, USA, and as a Program Officer at The Fetzer Institute in Michigan. In 2008, Dr. Adams was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil.