"This article explores the changing form of white and black racial categories in North America. It argues that this transformation is being shaped by several, relatively distinct tendencies; including anti-immigrant sentiments, anti-black racism and the identity politics of racialized populations. The discussion focuses on two aspects of this transformation. First, the identity politics of Afro-Caribbean populations is used to illustrate how immigrant experiences contest and complicate the process of black racialization; second, the racialization of Latino populations is used to illustrate how normative definitions of whiteness are being redefined. The conclusion uses these examples to discuss the need for explanations of racial stratification that can account for multiple nodes of inclusion and exclusion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Africans have begun to form a new diaspora in Brazil, the country with the largest concentration of Afro descendents outside of Africa. This paper aims to explore, through interviews, the various motivations and experiences of these Africans, as well as to examine the official attitude of the Brazilian authorities and that of the society at large to the new residents of this modern African diaspora.
Since its publication in 1976, Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus has gone through 21 printings, while receiving widespread--though not unanimous--condemnation from the American archaeological establishment, culminating in a hostile, full-length forum in Current Anthropology. And yet, startlingly, the field of American archaeology has recently found itself in the midst of a major paradigm shift, caused by archaeological evidence that obliterates the Clovis model as a legitimate demarcation of the first presence of human settlement in the New World. Kamugisha proposes to trace the response to They Came Before Columbus, while discussing the issue of diffusionism in van Sertima's work.;
Reviews several books regarding Cuban history which focused on the areas of race, identities, ideology and nationhood. Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution, by Lisa Brock and Digna Castaneda; `El Directorio Central de las Sociedades Negras de Cuba, 1886-1894,'by Oilda Hevia Lanier; Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940, by Robin Moore.;
"On the basis of Bastide's Les Amériques noires, this book review dwells on the memory of slavery and of African origins among black people in the New World. It focuses on the everyday as well as literary identity constructs presented in two recent books about Afro-Colombians and Creoles in Martinique." (author)
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the theory which held that the cultural assimilation of ethnic groups of Indian and African descent into the national Hispanic or Portuguese cultures implied an improvement in the condition of women has been challenged through ethnographic and historical research.
