In 2006, the Peruvian government passed a law that made racial discrimination a crime punishable by incarceration. This law, part of a multicultural reform in Peru, can be seen as an effective recognition of the reality of racism in Peruvian society. Such recognition, however, contrasts with official depictions of Peru as a country without racism, and of Peruvians as people who deny the existence of racism in their society.
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The author discusses Gates' exploration of the history of early race mixture, the contemporary valorization of Blackness, and racial inequality in Brazil.
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The author discusses the conceptualization of blackness in the Dominican Republic.
Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. Article shows how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centered on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.
In 2004, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva published an article in which he argued that the US system of race is beginning to resemble that of Latin America. This article is a critical reply to Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization thesis. The author introduces a Latin American perspective.
Christina A. Sue commented on my 2004 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies on the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA. Almost all her observations hinge on the assumption that racial stratification in Latin American countries is fundamentally structured around ‘two racial poles’. I disagree with her and in my reply do three things. First, I address three major claims or issues in her comment. Second, I point out some methodological limitations of American-centered race analysis in Latin America. Third, I conclude by discussing briefly the Obama phenomenon and suggest this event fits in many ways my Latin Americanization thesis.
The sexualisation of racially subordinated people has been linked to the exercise of power. This article focuses on an aspect of subordination related to the condition of being a servant, and the ‘domestication’ and ‘acculturation’ that domestic service implies in societies where black and indigenous people are often linked to ‘backwardness’. Perceived racial otherness, class subordination, gender, age and domesticated servitude together reinforce an erotic image of sexual availability, particularly in younger women.
Discusses feminist theorizing of beauty and its intersection with the notion of race in Latin America and the Caribbean including Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.
The article reviews the book "Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé," by J. Lorand Matory. "My extensive use of superlatives throughout this review should make it clear that I find the book to be invaluable and extraordinarily well researched. With that said, Black Atlantic Religion is not for the reader interested in the spiritual and/or practical side of Candomblé (e.g., practices/rituals, theology, internal hierarchy, etc.). In fact, I would argue that by focusing on the humanity of the practitioners (their interests, desires, strategies, and ideologies), Matory depicts Candomblé more as a political organization than a religious one." --Michael Iyanaga
"In this paper I should like to discuss a particular geographical area in Venezuela which has been heavily influenced by black populations stemming from colonial trans-Atlantic slave trade, i.e., the region known as Barlovento, which lies east-southeast of Caracas." (author);
Blacks; Women; Brazil; South America; Book reviews; PERRY, Keisha-Kkan Y; BLACK Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Book)
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread throughout Latin America and beyond based on the claim that they are an effective social policy tool to combat poverty. Gender relations are shaped by these policies. Recognizes the potential for CCTs to transform gender relations should mechanisms allowing childcare facilities and encouraging male participation in domestic labor become an integral part of these programs.
Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
Explanations of the Abolitionist movement's success in Brazil (1888) have, since the 1960s and 1970s, emphasized the movement's material context, its class nature, and the agency of the captives. These analyzzes have misunderstood and gradually ignored the movement's formal political history. Even the central role of urban political mobilisation is generally neglected; when it is addressed, it is crippled by lack of informed analysis of its articulation with formal politics and political history. It is time to recover the relationship between Afro-Brazilian agency and the politics of the elite. In this article this is illustrated by analysing two conjunctures critical to the Abolitionist movement: the rise and fall of the reformist Dantas cabinet in 1884-85, and the relationship between the reactionary Cotegipe cabinet (1885-88), the radicalisation of the movement, and the desperate reformism that led to the Golden Law of 13 May 1888.
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.
In an effort to push the literature on music and collective identity to examine how the cognitive dimension of collective identity gets constructed, a study shifts away from the customary focus on lyrics, toward an analysis of the everyday discursive contexts of music scenes, such as rehearsals, informal commentary, and training seminars. By examining such contexts within the black gospel music scene in São Paulo, Brazil, the study discovers that a complex ideology of racial identity, infused with ideas drawn from North American history and the Bible, circulates within the scene.
