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This collection of essays offers a comprehensive overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rich in theoretical framework and close textual analysis, these essays offer new paradigms and approaches to both reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states. The contributors are drawn from a variety of fields, including literary criticism, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The contributors to this book abandon the traditional approaches that study racialized oppression in Latin America only from the standpoint of its impact on either Indians or people of African descent. Instead they examine colonialism...
In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality's how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its "universals" of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.
Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwi...
By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively crea...
Debates on historical and contemporary racism have recently become the subject of increasing public interest. The Black Lives Matter movement as well as the Covid-19 pandemic have underlined the importance and urgent necessity of examining racism in society from a multidisciplinary angle. The many facets of racism in the past and present also challenge the way we deal with history ("historical culture") in a globalized world. Rather than focusing on the history of ideas and its discursive development, this volume will focus on the practices of actors. It examines how and which practices, especially practices of comparing, are constitutive in the construction of 'race' and manifestations of racism. This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions from history, sociology, political science, American studies, literary studies, and media studies. An important focus lies on the social asymmetries created by racialization, including inequalities and violence. The chapters foreground historical and contemporary practices of racism and discuss their appearance in different epochs and locations.
Examines the full range of humanities and social science scholarship on people of African descent in Latin America.
This book is a study of the forensic theatricality of human rights claims in literary texts about slavery in the sixteenth and the nineteenth century in the Spanish Empire. The book centers on the question: how do literary texts use theatrical, multisensorial strategies to denunciate the violence against enslaved people and make a claim for their rights? The Spanish context is particularly interesting because of its early tradition of human rights thinking in the Salamanca School (especially Bartolomé de Las Casas), developed in relation to slavery and colonialism. Taking its point of departure in forensic aesthetics, the book analyzes five forms of non-narrative theatricality: allegorical, carnivalesque, tragicomic, melodramatic and tragic.
Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.
The third edition of Democratic Latin America retains its classic institutional approach to understand contemporary Latin American politics. Each chapter focuses on a different institution and compares how they are constructed differently across countries. Placing a premium on accessibility, the chapters open with a story and end with a detailed country case study, making use of contemporary examples to feed student interest in current events, with comparison-based tables and box features interspersed throughout to stimulate analysis. Every chapter finishes with a set of questions and recommended readings. This approach allows for a very practical approach to politics that encourages critica...
Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art offers an innovative and systematic analysis of contemporary Caribbean art practices in the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanic Caribbean. Focusing on a broad range of artistic projects, the book assesses the potential of visual creativity to outline a unique approach to Caribbean visual practices based on individual and collective agency.