Explores the challenges that Afro-descendants face when trying to claim collective rights in Latin America, focusing specifically on the kinds of collective rights and modes of justification of such rights open to Afro-descendant movements in Latin America today.
The findings of a questionnaire survey distributed to 153 female university students in Barbados and Jamaica in 2008 reveal the attitudes to diverse female sexualities in the Caribbean. The participants in the survey discussed changing beliefs about sexuality in Caribbean society. The findings show that slowly, as a consequence of globalization and the mass media, people are increasingly open-minded about sex. Women are confidently expressing and increasingly asserting themselves as equal partners. There is greater debate in Caribbean society about female same-sex relationships, and deeper awareness of sexual harassment is evident. Nevertheless, for some respondents, the same degrading notions of women as sex objects and promiscuous beings continue to exist.
The intensification of ethno-racial protest in Latin America has led to the adoption of targeted legislation for Black and indigenous populations, signaling a new moment in race politics in this region. Existing literature has failed to account for this shift either because it held that race was not salient in Latin America, or it presumed that racial hierarchy existed, but that the obstacles to Black mobilization were insurmountable. Argues that the literature must contend with this new reality of “Black politics” in Latin America.
Examines racial politics in Brazil by analyzing the city of Salvador da Bahia's cultural policies over time and their relationship to national ideology and racial identity in Brazil more generally. It argues that the re-Africanization of Salvador's Carnival and its historical center, the Pelourinho, although initially products of the mobilization of Afro-Bahians themselves, have become institutionalized and ironically serve today as testaments to Brazil's diversity, tolerance, and integration.
When Ernesto Estupinan Quintero was elected mayor of the city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, in 2000, he was the first self-identifying Black person to reach this position. The city of Esmeraldas is the capital of the only province of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorians are the largest racial and cultural group. Immediately upon his election, Ernesto began commissioning murals and statues that contested traditional representations of Blackness.
This essay argues that the 2005 documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story uses narrative strategies that link it with the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. The film tells the story of a Caribbean-born boxer who killed his Cuban-born opponent in the ring for allegedly calling him a homosexual.
