Review also covers Whither Thou Goest -- Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country by Carl A. Brasseaux and others; and 'Who Set You Flowin'?' by Farah Jasmine Griffin
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism.
Proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address the colonial legacy and, to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body -- the New World slave -- with subjecthood.
