Compares the contemporary movements for cultural autonomy and social legitimation organized by the indigenous and Afrodescendant populations of Latin America. These movements are challenging the concept of blanqueamiento or whitening embedded in the process of mestizaje in Latin America. Whitening proclaimed the superiority of white European culture over indigenous and black culture, a concept these movements are challenging by proclaiming their own cultural autonomy.
"While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the 'foreign' cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as 'native ethnographers' will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography." (author)
Alvarez,Sonia E. (Editor), Dagnino,Evelina (Editor), and Escobar,Arturo (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 459
Notes:
Includes Black movements and the "politics of identity" in Brazil / Olivia maria Gomes da Cunha's "Black Movements and 'Politics of Identity' in Brazil"; and Libia Grueso, Carlos Rosero, Arturo Escobar Grueso's "The process of black community organizing in the southern Pacific coast region of Colombia"
About a unique case of assimilation: the entry of descendants of nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century European immigrants to southern Brazil into Afro‐Brazilian religious groups, some as heads of their own centres. The discussion is placed within the framework of the contemporary multiculturalist debate over assimilation. The emigration of Europeans to rural southern Brazil is summarized. African slaves are shown to have been established ‐ with their syncretized Afro‐Catholic religions ‐ in the incipient urban centres. T
