169 p., Examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, the author refers to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
311 p., Focuses on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. Argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation.
164 p., Traces the journey of blacks from the Middle Passage through urban migration northward in black fiction. Argues that the historical use of religious rhetoric is transcended in black writing of the 20th century in order to recast black victimization during slavery, counter the progress of turn-of-the-century white supremacy, and chronicle the rise of economic racism which created the 20th century black ghetto. The religious doctrines discussed in this study include Puritan missionizing and heretical purges in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , the social work of the Catholic church in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South , and the cultural intensity of the Pentecostal/Apostolic church in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
422 p., A study of the politics of race, culture and identity among Garinagu in Honduras. Garinagu are a people of African and Amerindian descent deported by the British from St. Vincent to Central America in 1797. Within Honduras, they have been racially interpellated as “black” in contradistinction to the dominant mestizo, understood as the product of the racial-cultural fusion between the European and the Indian. Anthropological studies have failed to substantially investigate the relationship between Garinagu and the mestizo-dominated society and state. They have also neglected the construction of racial-cultural identity among Garinagu themselves.
Chicago: University of Chicago, Dept. of Anthropology
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
272 p., Analyzes the relations between macropolitical changes and the lives of people in Alcantara. Chapters detail: (1) the changing social, economic, and ecological lives of Alcantara's villagers; (2) the contested effects of recent multicultural governance in Brazil--specifically remanescentes das comunidades dos quilombos (escaped-slave descended communities); (3) how state-sanctioned experts in Alcantara help shape people's understanding of the region's deep social inequality; and (4) the circulation of rumors of US plans to undermine Brazil's space program and invade the Amazon forest.
