African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
213 p., A ollection of stories about the lives of 10 remarkable people in the region. From Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic to Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, readers will come to know individuals whose lives reflect the history and immense changes underway in these countries.
Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The authors examine Gates' presentation of blackness in Mexico and Peru. Their critique of the film focuses on the themes of national ideology, racial categorization, and portrayals of the 'black' experience.
