Search results

This book examines, in Andean national contexts, the impacts of the 'Latin American multicultural turn' of the past two decades on Afro Andean cultural politics, emphasizing both transformations and continuities. Jean Muteba Rahier is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African African Diaspora Studies program at Florida International University, USA.

Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; mestizaje and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural mestizaje' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the revolucion ciudadana (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador

Setting up the stage : contextualizing the Afro-Esmeraldian festival of the kings -- The village of Santo Domingo de Onzole and the period of preparation of the festival of the kings : the centrality of sexual dichotomy and role reversal -- The festival of the kings in Santo Domingo de Onzole -- The festival of the kings in La Tola -- Race, sexuality, and gender as they relate to the festival of the kings -- Performances and contexts of the play in January 2003 -- Conclusion : from the centrality of place in Esmeraldian ethnography to theoretical and methodological considerations for the study of festivities -- Glossary of Esmeraldian Spanish terms

Abstract In this essay, I write about the initiative of engaged legal anthropology that led to the formation of the Observatory of Justice for Afrodescendants in Latin America (OJALA), housed in the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (KG-LACC) at Florida International University (FIU). I have been delighted to serve as OJALA's main coordinator and founding director since February 2018. This piece's intent is to explain the foundation of OJALA, out of an interest for understanding how the Latin American multiculturalist state "functions" in the concrete relations it threads with its Afrodescendant citizens, and particularly and most importantly, what the state's justice system does, or doesn't do, in the courts of law, with the legal instruments the "new Latin American constitutionalism" brought, when the time comes to defend Afrodescendants' rights. This led us to engage in careful comparative ethnographic work on specific litigations filed by Afrodescendants in the justice systems of various Latin American countries. Ultimately, the ethnographic knowledge of Latin American justice systems "at work" will be useful for the enhancement of the public acknowledgement, protection, and defense of Afrodescendants' rights.

In this essay, I contribute to the examination of racism and discrimination in Andean societies, and particularly in Ecuador, by focusing on the reproduction of stereotypical representations of black women as hypersexual beings in ordinary Ecuadorian society. I pay careful attention to visual images and their accompanying written texts in the Ecuadorian press and in other media. This allows for a consideration of ideological continuities across different periods of Ecuadorian history. Stereotypes about blackness, black bodies, and black sexuality abound in Ecuador. They share similarities with comparable representations in other Latin American contexts or on the transnational scene. They work to evoke black uncontrolled sexuality as the trope per excellence for 'savagery' at the same time that they suggest black female body's availability for white-mestizo male consumption/penetration. I propose an analysis of the recurrence of these images with respect for the specificities of the recent history of the Ecuadorian national context. Adapted from the source document.

With this book, Marc Becker addresses a number of erroneous assumptions about Indigenous movements in Ecuador. He first takes issue with the belief that Indigenous people put an end to centuries of political passivity with what is often referred to as the first Indigenous levantamiento (uprising) in June 1990, when "indigenous peoples shocked the dominant blanco-mestizo(white) population of Ecuador with a powerful uprising that paralyzed the country for a week" (1). During this uprising they presented to Rodrigo Borja Cevallos, who was then the President from the center-left political party Izquierda Democrática, a list of sixteen demands for cultural, economic, and political rights, insisting that the government address long-standing and unresolved issues of land ownership, education, economic development, and the Indigenous relationship with state structures (1).