This volume seeks to introduce readers to the dynamic and growing field of Afro-Latin American studies. We define that field, first, as the study of people of African ancestry in Latin America, and second, as the study of the larger societies in which those people live. Under the first heading, scholars study Black histories, cultures, strategies, and struggles in the region. Under the second, they study blackness, and race more generally, as a category of difference, as an engine of stratification and inequality, and as a key variable in processes of national formation.
There are sound historical reasons for both approaches. Of the 10.7 million enslaved Africans who arrived in the New World between 1500 and 1870, almost two-thirds came to colonies controlled by Spain or Portugal (Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat Reference Borucki, Eltis and Wheat2015, 440; see also Chapter 2). It was in those territories that slavery lasted for the longest periods of time in the Western Hemisphere, spanning over 350 years. Africans began arriving at the islands of the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century, and slavery was not finally abolished in those islands until 1886, when the last slaves were emancipated in Cuba. Two years later, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery; today it is home to the second-largest Afrodescendant population in the world, exceeded in size only by Nigeria. Close to a million Africans arrived in Cuba during the nineteenth century and over two million in Brazil, a process that helps explain the profound influence that African-based cultural practices have exercised in the formation of national cultures in those two countries and around the region more generally.
Yet it was not until quite recently that the scholarship on race, inequality, and racial stratification in Latin America had grown enough to develop the sorts of questions and debates that sustain and constitute a field of study. Writing in 1992, Thomas Skidmore, at that time the leading scholar of Brazil in the United States, noted that one could “count on the fingers of one hand the … authors who have done serious research on post-abolition race relations.” Skidmore was talking specifically about Brazil, but his observation could be applied to Spanish America as well. Throughout Latin America, scholars interested in Afrodescendant peoples had focused almost entirely on the period of slavery, “as if the topic of race ceased to have any relevance … after slavery ended” (Skidmore Reference Skidmore1992, 8).
During most of the 1900s, the idea that race was not an important dimension of Latin American societies was widespread in the region. National ideologies of racial inclusion, discussed in depth in Paulina L. Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 8), argued that Latin American societies had transcended their colonial histories of state-mandated racial inequality to become, in the 1800s and 1900s, “racial democracies” governed by social norms of racial harmony and equality. National politics in the region were driven not by racial tensions and divisions, it was argued, but by conflicts and negotiations among competing social classes. For most observers of the region, the central questions of the twentieth century were how to achieve self-sustaining economic growth and development, and how to allocate power and resources among elites, middle classes, workers, and peasants.
As we write in 2017, that panorama has shifted dramatically. Formerly considered “irrelevant,” race is now at the center of research on Latin American societies (see, e.g., Wade Reference Wade2009, Reference Wade2010, Reference Wade2017; Gotkowitz Reference Gotkowitz2011; Hernández Reference Hernández2013; Loveman Reference Loveman2014; Telles and PERLA Reference Telles2014). This has been especially the case with Afro-Latin American topics. As the chapters in this volume abundantly show, over the last thirty years scholars have produced a rich outpouring of research and writing on time frames ranging from the period of colonial slavery to the present day. This shift occurred partly in response to the realization, articulated by postcolonial scholars, that race is central to historic and contemporary processes of coloniality (Quijano Reference Quijano2000; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2005). Just as important, however, were the political and social changes taking place in the region.
The field of Afro-Latin American studies has developed in tandem with, and to a large degree in response to, a wave of racially defined social, cultural, and political movements that, taking advantage of democratization processes since the 1980s, have transformed how Latin Americans think about their region, culture, and history. Building on social sciences research that has documented persistent racial inequality across time, these movements have challenged traditional discourses on race and nation that depict the region as racially egalitarian and harmonious. They have also demanded legislation and specific policies to address discrimination and inequality, and their efforts have produced results. Starting with the Nicaraguan constitutional reform of 1987, which recognized the existence of minority communities on the Atlantic coast, legal instruments that ban discrimination and acknowledge the multiracial character of Latin American societies have proliferated. In 1988 the Brazilian constitution banned discrimination and recognized the rights of former runaway slave communities (quilombos) to their ancestral lands. Other countries (e.g., Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras) followed suit and now recognize collective rights for the population of African descent, while others (Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Panama, Uruguay) explicitly condemn discrimination because of race (see Chapters 5, 7, and 13). Activists also targeted the national censuses and demanded the inclusion of ethno-racial categories to counter the traditional invisibility of these groups. While in the 1980s only Cuba and Brazil collected information concerning individuals of African descent, by the 2010s Afrodescendants were counted in seventeen of the nineteen countries in the region (Loveman Reference Loveman2014).
International organizations and agencies have acknowledged the importance and scope of these movements and taken concrete institutional steps to address issues of racial justice in their activities. Examples include the Rapporteurship on the Rights of Persons of African Descent and against Racial Discrimination created by the Organization of American States in 2005, and the Gender and Diversity Division created by the Inter-American Development Bank in 2007. The Division’s mission is to “promote gender equality and support development with identity for African descendants and indigenous peoples in the Latin America and the Caribbean region” (IADB 2017). The United Nations Development Program sponsors a project on the Afrodescendant Population of Latin America and monitors racial discrimination in the region through its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). In 2010 the US State Department created the Race, Ethnicity, and Social Inclusion Unit, which coordinates US diplomacy on social inclusion and racial equality issues in the Western Hemisphere. Three years later the United Nations approved resolution 68/237, which proclaims 2015–24 as the International Decade for People of African Descent. International development agencies have also included metrics of racial inequality in their development benchmarks, giving additional visibility and support to race justice agendas.
All of these actors – activists, government officials, representatives and employees of international agencies and organizations – have contributed to the growth and development of Afro-Latin American studies as a field. Their programs and demands have shaped how scholars study Afrodescendants in the region. The chapters in this volume illustrate the richness and disciplinary variety of this scholarly production.
The Origins of Afro-Latin American Studies
Early studies of the history, behavior, and culture of Afrodescendants in Latin America were very much attuned to the voluminous scientific literature that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sought to demonstrate and document the biological foundations of black inferiority. The combination of anthropometric measurements feeding a variety of indices of human worth, evolutionary theories, and the social Darwinist belief that human history was centrally about the inevitable competition of racial groups, some of which were destined to perish and live under the control of the fittest – all of these turned Latin America into an area of special interest for “scientific” studies of race. The region’s high degree of miscegenation or racial mixture was seen as a clear indicator of racial degeneration and social decadence, a point emphasized by the pioneering scientific racists Arthur de Gobineau and Louis Agassiz when they (independently) visited Brazil in the 1860s (Skidmore Reference Skidmore1974).
In an effort to better understand that degeneration and decadence, a handful of Latin American scholars and writers – for example, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (Reference Rodrigues1900) in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz (Reference Ortiz1906, Reference Ortiz1916) and Israel Castellanos (Reference Castellanos1916) in Cuba – carried out research on what they viewed as black “pathologies,” gathering information on turn-of-the-century Afro-Latin American religious life, criminality, and family structure. Much of the information reported by those writers is still useful to scholars today, but the racial attitudes embodied in their work, and widely diffused among the region’s elites, left little room for black participation in national life.
This was very much in keeping with the oligarchical political and social structures in force in most of Latin America at that time – indeed, scientific racism was a primary support of elite arguments that the racially mixed masses were incapable of playing a responsible role in national life (Figueras Reference Figueras1907; Ingenieros Reference Ingenieros1913; Valenilla Lanz Reference Valenilla Lanz1919; Viana Reference Viana1922). During the 1910s and 1920s, however, workers’ movements and middle-class reformist movements began to demand a greater role in national politics; at the same time, nationalist pressures grew for the construction of new national identities based not on ideas and models imported from Europe, but on the actual historical and present-day experiences of Latin Americans as a people. These political developments set the stage for a major revision of racial thought in the region, in the form of the concept of “racial democracy” (see Chapter 8). Where the scientific racists had either rejected the notion of black contributions to national life, or had treated those contributions as almost entirely negative, writers and intellectuals associated with new ideologies of racial inclusion – Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, José Vasconcelos in Mexico, Juan Pablo Sojo in Venezuela – acknowledged the role of Africans and their descendants in creating new, distinctly Latin American national cultures, societies, and identities. Those cultures and societies were neither African nor European in form or content. Rather, they were a mixture of African, European, and Amerindian elements, combined in a centuries-long process of cultural and racial mixture that had produced something completely new in world historical experience: a “New World in the tropics,” in Freyre’s formulation, or a new “cosmic race,” in the language of Vasconcelos.
The willingness of the proponents of racial democracy to acknowledge black contributions to national life opened the door to greatly expanded research on Afro-Latin American topics. This was most notably the case in Brazil, where Freyre (Reference Freyre1933, Reference Freyre1936), Arthur Ramos (Reference Ramos1937, Reference Ramos1940), and Edison Carneiro (Reference Carneiro1936, Reference Carneiro1937), to mention only the most prominent names, spearheaded a wave of research on Afro-Brazilian history and culture in the plantation zones of the Northeast. Some of their findings were presented at two Afro-Brazilian Congresses held during the 1930s (Congresso Afro-Brasileiro 1937, 1940), which in turn stimulated more such work; a small core of scholars started working on racial questions in the southeastern state of São Paulo in the 1940s (Nogueira Reference Nogueira1942; Bicudo Reference Bicudo1947; Bastide and Fernandes Reference 19Bastide and Fernandes1953). In Cuba, the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano and the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, both founded by Fernando Ortiz during the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, carried out research on black contributions to Cuban culture and national identity, much of it published in Ortiz’s journal, Estudios Afrocubanos. Similar institutions were created in Venezuela (the Servicio de Investigaciones Folklóricas, established in 1946), Colombia (the Instituto Etnológico Nacional, 1943), and Brazil (the Comissão Nacional de Folclore, 1947). In other countries, individual scholars – Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (Reference Aguirre Beltrán1946, Reference Aguirre Beltrán1958) in Mexico, Aquiles Escalante (Reference Escalante1964) in Colombia, Armando Fortune (Maloney Reference Maloney1994) in Panama, Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (Carvalho Neto Reference Carvalho Neto1955) in Uruguay – carried out pioneering research.
These early efforts tended to focus on black religion, dance, linguistics, and other cultural forms, or on community studies. For the most part they left aside questions of racial inequality or discrimination, largely accepting the argument that Latin America’s historical experience of racial and cultural mixture had eliminated racism and prejudice and produced societies that offered equal opportunity to all. There were some dissenting voices, however, particularly in the black newspapers of the region, which noted sharp disparities between semi-official ideologies of racial equality and the empirical realities of discrimination, prejudice, and black poverty (de la Fuente Reference De la Fuente2001; Andrews Reference Andrews2010; Geler Reference Geler2010; Guridy Reference Guridy2010; Alberto Reference Alberto2011; see also Chapter 6). Those voices in the black press were joined in the 1930s and 1940s by Communist activists in Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries, who made anti-racism a central plank of their party programs, and then in the 1940s and 1950s by a handful of intellectuals and scholars who increasingly questioned whether Latin American societies were in fact racial democracies. Most of these critics were Afrodescendant: in Brazil, Edison Carneiro, Clóvis Moura (Reference Moura1959, Reference Moura1977), Abdias do Nascimento (Reference Nascimento1968; Quilombo 2003), and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (Reference Ramos1957); in Cuba, Gustavo Urrutia, Alberto Arredondo (Reference Arredondo1939), Juan René Betancourt (Reference Betancourt1945, 1954, Reference Betancourt1959), Serafín Portuondo Linares (Reference Portuondo Linares1950), and Walterio Carbonell (Reference Carbonell1961); and in Colombia, Aquiles Escalante (Reference Escalante1964), and Manuel Zapata Olivella (Reference Zapata Olivella1967).
In Brazil, some of the racial democracy critics were white, particularly in São Paulo, where French sociologist Roger Bastide had encouraged his students Florestan Fernandes, Oracy Nogueira, and others to study Brazilian race relations, and Fernandes had gone on to train his own students, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octávio Ianni, to do the same. These white intellectuals enjoyed much greater legitimacy and received far greater public and scholarly attention than their black colleagues. Black critics of racial democracy were more likely to occupy marginal positions in academic and intellectual life, both because of their racial status and because of their questioning of one of the core components of national identity. They were also more easily dismissed as poorly adjusted malcontents with personal axes to grind. White critics, by contrast, acted from seemingly disinterested motives; the previously mentioned white Brazilians, far from being socially or professionally marginal, were affiliated with the most prestigious institution of higher education in the country, the University of São Paulo.
Still, even if white critics of racial democracy received more attention than black ones, neither group had much immediate impact on mainstream scholarly institutions in the region, which remained for the most part indifferent to Afro-related themes. Despite the undeniable progress that had been made since the 1930s in studying black history and culture, by the 1970s the quantity of scholarly literature available was still miniscule, in relation either to studies of black history and culture in the United States or to studies of Amerindian populations in Latin America. During the last forty years, however, the situation has changed dramatically, as the chapters in this volume make clear.
Why this explosion of work on Afro-Latin America? One reason is undoubtedly the growth in Latin American higher education more generally. Since 1960, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries have invested enormous sums in expanding their university systems; inevitably this expanded those countries’ research capacity as well (Balán Reference Balán and Balán2013). But after years of relative indifference to Afro-Latin American topics, why did researchers start turning toward black history and culture as an area of study?
That turn took place in part because of thickening scholarly networks and dialogues between Latin America and the United States, particularly around questions of slavery and race. In response to the rise of the civil rights and Black Power movements, scholars in the United States were paying increasing attention to questions of race, producing classic works that are still obligatory reading today (Woodward Reference Woodward1955; Stampp Reference Stampp1956; Davis Reference 20Davis1966, Reference Davis1975; Franklin Reference Franklin1967; Wilson Reference Wilson1978). As US scholars thought about their country’s racial past and present, many pushed on to ask how the US experience of slavery, or of the post-emancipation period, or of present-day race relations, compared to similar experiences in Brazil, Cuba, and the British Caribbean. At the same time, newly trained US historians of Latin America wrestled with the other end of the comparison: how did the racial experiences of Latin America compare to those of the United States? A few undertook research comparing the two regions (Tannenbaum Reference Tannenbaum1946; Elkins Reference Elkins1959; Harris Reference Harris1964; Klein Reference Klein1967; Degler Reference Degler1971; Hoetink Reference Hoetink1973). Most, while motivated by comparative interests, focused on Latin America, and usually on the experience of slavery. The result was a surge of scholarship during the 1970s that, while small in relation to the amount of work being done on the United States, nevertheless represented a marked increase in scholarly attention to Afro-Latin America (e.g., Knight Reference Knight1970; Hall Reference Hall1971; Conrad Reference Conrad1972; Bowser Reference Bowser1974; Skidmore Reference Skidmore1974; Toplin Reference Toplin1974; Whitten Reference Whitten1974; Dean Reference Dean1976; Rout Reference Rout1976).
Those early comparative studies were based on the belief that race relations in Latin America were more harmonious than in the United States and that this difference was the product of dissimilar histories of race and slavery. Scholars such as Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins had fully absorbed the racial democracy arguments that Latin American intellectuals had articulated in the 1920s and 1930s. They studied Latin America, but they did so in order to understand and find solutions to race problems in the United States. The same belief animated some of the first studies about racial inequality in Latin America, sponsored by UNESCO in the 1950s. In a world besieged by racial conflicts, these studies sought to understand how Brazil had succeeded in creating a functioning racial democracy. In the process, they made two key contributions to the field. First, they highlighted the need to study contemporary race relations (not just slavery) in the region. Second, their findings generated a healthy skepticism concerning some of the central claims of the proponents of racial democracy.
This skepticism informed the work of a new generation of Latin American scholars, some of whom had studied in US universities. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, these scholars produced their own readings of the Afro-Latin American past and present (Fernandes Reference Fernandes1965; Costa Reference Costa1966; Carvalho Neto Reference Carvalho Neto1971; Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals1978; Silva Reference Silva1978; Hasenbalg Reference Hasenbalg1979; Colmenares Reference Colmenares1979; Deive Reference Deive1980; Nistal-Moret Reference Nistal Moret1984; Friedemann and Arocha Reference Friedemann and Arocha1986; Reis Reference Reis1986; Machado Reference 22Machado1987). As they did so, they engaged not just with their North American counterparts but also with the black political movements that were forming in various countries of the region during the 1970s and 1980s. Those movements, discussed in depth in Chapter 7, had major impacts not just on the politics of the region but on its intellectual and scholarly life as well.
Black Mobilization and the Production of Knowledge
On December 5–7, 2000, more than 1,700 activists and government representatives from all over the Americas convened in Santiago de Chile. They were attending the Regional Conference of the Americas, in preparation for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that would take place in Durban, South Africa, a year later. It was a landmark event. On the one hand, the widespread participation of activists and community leaders illustrated how much the movement for civil rights and racial justice had advanced in Latin America since the collapse of most authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s (Andrews Reference Andrews2004, Reference Andrews2016; Yashar Reference Yashar2005; Hernández Reference Hernández2013). On the other hand, the event marked the public acknowledgment by state authorities that racism is a major problem in the region, demanding a serious policy response. As the conference’s concluding declaration stated, “ignoring the existence of discrimination and racism, at both the State and the society level, contributes directly and indirectly to perpetuating the practices of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Racism and discrimination were characterized as historical products of “conquest, colonialism, slavery and other forms of servitude” but, taking a cue from scholarship on contemporary engines of racial stratification, the declaration noted that the effects of these processes persisted and “are” – in present tense – “a source of systemic discrimination that still affects large sectors of the population” (UN General Assembly 2001).
In order to combat the effects of racism, discrimination and racial injustice in the region, the Conference approved an ambitious “Plan of Action” (UN General Assembly 2001). This plan had deep implications for the field of Afro-Latin American studies, for several of its measures were linked to the production and dissemination of knowledge concerning people of African descent in the region. The plan “urged” states to compile and disseminate statistical data on racialized groups. This information would serve as the basis for programs of inclusion and access to basic social services and economic opportunities, including policies of affirmative action. Some of the items in the plan concerned education in fairly concrete ways. The parties agreed on the need to create educational and research programs about Africa’s contributions to history and civilization, as well as to disseminate information against racial stereotypes and myths. The plan asked states to include the study of racism in university curricula and to organize courses on racism and discrimination “for prosecutors, law enforcement officials, members of the judiciary and other public employees.” Attention was also given to the media, to its role in disseminating racial images and information and to the need “to ensure the fair and balanced presence of people of African descent” in it.
One of the key contributions of the Santiago Conference is that it sanctioned and normalized the category of “Afrodescendants” as a group with legal, cultural, and ethical implications in the arenas of international justice and human rights (Laó-Montes Reference Laó-Montes2009; Campos García Reference Campos García, Valero and García2015). It also helped consolidate and make visible a transnational network of race-justice activists that was able to exercise pressure on national governments for the adoption of specific policies against racism and discrimination. As part of these efforts, activists not only deployed knowledge produced by academics, as was notably the case in Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s (Htun Reference Htun2004), but they also produced, systematized, and disseminated important new knowledge concerning their communities. As activists formulated demands in the areas of health care, education, environmental justice, job training, gender violence, poverty eradication, and police brutality, among others, they were compelled to gather and produce valuable information concerning Afrodescendants and their cultures and living conditions across the region. On top of that, the movement itself has become a subject of intense study, prompting numerous studies about race and mobilization in contemporary Latin America (Escobar Reference Escobar2008; de la Fuente Reference De la Fuente2012; Martínez Reference Martínez2012; Pisano Reference Pisano2012; Rahier Reference 23Rahier2012; Pereira Reference Pereira2013; Valero and Campos García Reference 24Valero and García2015; Paschel Reference Paschel2016).
This volume constitutes yet another example of the impact of activists from the Afrodescendant movement on the field of Afro-Latin American Studies. Our book has been conceived and executed in conversations between academics and activists. These exchanges took place in two landmark events sponsored by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, in collaboration with the University of Cartagena, in 2015 and 2016. The events gathered prominent figures of the Afrodescendant movement, many of whom had attended the 2000 meeting in Santiago, to assess the implementation of the Plan of Action, its successes and failures. Part of the agenda, however, was also to analyze the impact of the movement on the field of Afro-Latin American studies, in order to articulate new research questions and agendas. Just as we attempted to evaluate the outcomes of the Santiago meeting, we sought also to evaluate the trajectory of this field of study that, not coincidentally, has come of age along with the consolidation and expansion of the Afrodescendant movement. The field has grown enough to sustain specialized journals such as Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Afro-Hispanic Review, Revista Áfro-Asia, América Negra (published in Colombia from 1991 to 1998), and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies; to allow for the publication of several synthetic overviews (Andrews Reference Andrews2004; Wade Reference Wade2010; Gates Reference 21Gates2011); to sustain specialized research units such as the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) at Harvard University; and to populate the Afro-Latin America book series at Cambridge University Press. It is precisely because the field has grown so much, both thematically and in terms of disciplinary approaches, that we felt the need to assess its current state, recent achievements, and possible future directions. That is the purpose of the chapters in this volume.
The Chapters
In thinking about how to organize the volume, we faced a series of questions. What topics were essential to include? And how should those topics be presented: as literature reviews tracing the development of a field or subfield (how have scholars thought and written about, for example, Afro-Latin American religions over time?); as historical narratives based on syntheses of past and current literature (how have Afro-Latin American religious forms evolved and developed over time?); or as some combination of those two? Meanwhile, what about the challenges of achieving full regional and chronological coverage? All of the topics in this volume have long historical trajectories, and most of them appear, in one form or another, in all or most of the countries in the region. How could we effectively compress 500-year continent-wide experiences into relatively short synthetic articles?
On both fronts – mode of presentation, and temporal and geographical coverage – we ultimately decided that authors would be free to decide how best to present their topic. Concerning mode of presentation, most opted for some combination of literature review and historical narrative. In terms of geographical coverage, the volume ended up leaning heavily on Brazil, with Cuba and Colombia in second and third place. Those emphases reflect both the size of Afrodescendant populations in those countries – Brazil alone accounts for over 70 percent of Latin America’s Afrodescendants (Telles and PERLA Reference Telles2014, 26) – and, not coincidentally, the relative state of development of Afro-Latin American studies in those countries. In an effort to ensure adequate coverage of Spanish America, we invited contributors who have worked on Argentina, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. One of our hopes for the volume is that setting the Brazilian literature in dialogue with its Spanish American counterparts will spark new research questions on both sides of that exchange, leading to further development and enrichment of the field.
From the beginning of the volume to the end, a focus on the voices, actions, strategies, and decisions of Africans and their descendants drives every one of the chapters. In direct response to earlier generations of scholarship, recent work on Afro-Latin American studies privileges the concept of black agency. The scientific racists had seen black people as hapless victims of their genetic inferiority. The proponents of racial democracy did not completely escape the heritage of scientific racism, assuming that blacks and mulattoes would progress in Latin American societies only to the degree that they were able to whiten themselves, either genetically or culturally. The Marxist-influenced writers of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Fernandes Reference Fernandes1965; Costa Reference Costa1966; Rama Reference Rama1967; Moreno Fraginals Reference Moreno Fraginals1978) forcefully rejected any hint of racism but viewed Afro-Latin America and its inhabitants as being very much at the mercy of the needs and “imperatives” of capitalist development.
A focus on black agency is most obvious in chapters by Frank A. Guridy and Juliet Hooker on black political thinkers (Chapter 6); by Doris Sommer on black writers (Chapter 9); by Tianna Paschel on black political movements (Chapter 7); by Alejandro de la Fuente on black visual artists (Chapter 10); and by Karl Offen (Chapter 13) on the cultural geographies of black settlement in the New World. But the other chapters follow this approach as well. In Chapter 2, Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas trace the multiple roles of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade, not least their role in introducing African understandings of the world to colonial societies in the Americas. Offen focuses in Chapter 13 on the environmental knowledge that Africans brought with them, and how they and their descendants applied that knowledge first to understand and then to modify the landscapes that were their new homes. Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg, and Hebe Mattos apply a similar perspective in Chapter 5 to the legal landscapes that enslaved Africans encountered in the New World, showing how Africans and their descendants learned those landscapes and then, through quiet lobbying and legal action, gradually transformed them. Lara Putnam considers Afrodescendants’ decisions on how, when, and whether to move from one place to another, and the evolving migratory streams and experiences that those decisions produced in Chapter 14. George Reid Andrews discusses the broad range of strategies that Afrodescendants used to move upward in colonial and post-independence societies in Chapter 3.
All of the chapters grapple as well with the notorious methodological difficulties of researching the Afro-Latin American past and present. For example, in order to recover the ideas and voices of black political thinkers, Guridy and Hooker push well beyond traditional canons of political thought in the region to include black newspapers, poetry, and song lyrics. In Chapter 10, de la Fuente cautions that most of the artistic production that he is writing about no longer exists, and most of its creators are now forgotten. In almost all of the subfields addressed by the chapters, scholarly reconstructions of that past and present are very much still in progress, and in some cases just beginning.
The volume begins with a section of chapters on the deeply embedded inequalities that have shaped the development of Afro-Latin American societies over time. Ferreira and Seijas present the starting point of those inequalities, the Atlantic slave trade, in Chapter 2. Noting how scholarly research on the trade began in the 1950s and 1960s with questions that were primarily quantitative (how many people were involved? from what parts of Africa? traveling to what parts of the Americas?), they discuss how recent research has sought to supplement quantitative interpretations with approaches drawn from social, cultural, and Atlantic history. Those approaches are more likely to focus on the lived experiences of those caught up in the slave trade and on the reciprocal impacts of long-term ties between Africa and the Americas.
Chapters by Andrews (Chapter 3) and Peter Wade (Chapter 4) also begin with slavery and then go on to trace the long-term historical impacts of colonial institutions and practices. Andrews surveys the evolving intersections of racial, class, and gender inequality in the region over the last 500 years. Wade takes as his starting point the colonial ideologies and regulations governing African and indigenous peoples. While those practices assigned Africans and indigenous peoples different places in colonial racial hierarchies, they did not prevent frequent cross-racial contacts and interaction and the creation, in much of Afro-Latin America, of large Afro-indigenous populations. Black and indigenous peoples continue to interact up to the present, helping to shape the contours of present-day multicultural movements and state policies in the region.
Focusing specifically on Brazil, Fischer, Grinberg, and Mattos (Chapter 5) examine the legal structures through which inequality was established and maintained during the colonial period, followed by the “racial silence” of the post-slavery period, in which Brazilian (and Spanish American) law dropped almost all references to race and any formal pretense to maintaining racial inequality. They find that “racial silence” did little to reverse inequalities inherited from the colonial period and in some ways worked to reinforce them. The chapter concludes with a review of recent (post-1985) policies that seek to combat racial inequality.
A second section of chapters considers the realm of politics. In Chapter 6, Guridy and Hooker examine the broad spectrum of Afro-Latin American political thought during the 1800s and 1900s. They demonstrate the multivocality and intellectual richness of the debates among those thinkers. Especially valuable is the chapter’s discussion of black feminist thinkers and, as suggested earlier, its efforts to recover ideas that were expressed in venues other than canonical political writing. Paschel’s chapter on black political movements pays equally close attention to black feminism, and to Afrodescendant participation in key moments of the region’s history: independence and nation-building in the 1800s, the rise of populism and mass-based political movements in the 1900s, and the multicultural turn of the late 1900s and early 2000s (Chapter 7).
One of the central demands of the most recent (post-1980) generation of black movements and thinkers has been that Latin American societies reconsider the idea that they were, to use the Brazilian term, “racial democracies.” In Chapter 8, Alberto and Hoffnung-Garskof carefully trace the origins of that term and concept and identify its national variants in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Spanish American countries. In so doing, they document a lively hemispheric conversation on ideas of racial inclusion and exclusion that continues to the present.
A third section of chapters examines black thought and action in various cultural fields: literature (Chapter 9), visual arts (Chapter 10), music (Chapter 11), religion (Chapter 12), and cultural geographies (Chapter 13). While exploring those topics, the chapters grapple with several common questions, beginning with what we mean when we talk about Afro-Latin American cultural artifacts. Do we mean works produced by Afrodescendants, works on Afrodescendant themes or topics, works incorporating African or African-derived cultural elements, or something else entirely? Sommer responds to that question by focusing on formal literary strategies, and in particular on black authors’ use of an “unrelenting … doubling of codes, of systems, beliefs, meanings, languages, personae.” De la Fuente adopts a three-part definition incorporating works produced by Afrodescendant artists, works that include (or claim to include) African-derived cultural elements, and works that comment in some way on race and blackness. Paul Christopher Johnson and Stephan Palmié focus in Chapter 12 on the second part of that definition, examining religious beliefs and practices that claim descent from Africa. They explore the content and meaning of such claims and how they have evolved over time to produce, since 2000, a transnational religious “superform” drawing elements from across the region and from Africa. They also consider the question of what we mean when we talk about a “religion,” as distinct from spiritual beliefs and practices.
Religion figures as well in Robin Moore’s chapter on music (Chapter 11) and Offen’s on African and Afro-Latin American cultural geographies (Chapter 13). Music was intimately connected to African religious observance, and many nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical forms – Cuban rumba, Brazilian samba, Uruguayan candombe – trace their antecedents to African ritual musics. As those forms were commercialized and “nationalized” (Moore Reference Moore1997) in the 1900s, becoming core symbols of national identity, how did that change their relationship to blackness and to the African-derived traditions on which they were based? Offen explores both the spiritual meanings that Africans and their descendants read in New World landscapes and the scientific understandings that they applied to those landscapes. Both sets of understandings were critical to slave survival on plantations and to the establishment of independent quilombo and free black communities in the countryside. They also continue to inform current debates on rural black communities and their claims to land and cultural rights.
Reflecting an important recent trend in social scientific and humanistic scholarship, a final set of chapters considers the role of transnational connections and spaces in Afro-Latin American life. Beginning with the Atlantic slave trade and continuing up to the present, Putnam surveys the many different migratory streams that developed both within Latin America, and from the region to destinations in North America and Europe (Chapter 14). In keeping with the volume’s emphasis on agency, she discusses how, why, and when individuals, families, and entire communities made strategic decisions to leave specific places to move to others, producing an evolving panorama of movement that indelibly shaped the societies of the region. The volume’s concluding chapter, by Jennifer A. Jones, focuses specifically on Afro-Latin American migration to the United States and the recent emergence of a new scholarly subfield, Afro-Latino studies (Chapter 15). Reflecting on the challenges that that migration has posed to racial understandings both in this country and in Latin America, Jones calls for the further development of Afro-Latino studies as a field that can mediate among African diaspora studies, African-American studies, and Afro-Latin American studies.
Future Directions
Our volume highlights the complexity and richness of this growing field, but by no means exhausts it. There are many themes that have resulted in the production of significant bodies of scholarship – gender and patriarchy, slave emancipation, marronage and slave resistance, the rise of legal human rights regimes concerning blackness – that could have been considered for possible chapters. These themes do appear in the chapters in this volume, but we readily concede that there are alternative ways to organize an exploration of the field.
Many of the chapters are chronologically ambitious and encompass the colonial and the national periods. By adopting this temporal frame, they explore the long-term impact of slavery on post-emancipation societies. This is one of the research questions that has guided the field since the comparative studies of the mid-twentieth century, which posited that the explanation for differences in modern race relations was to be found in the evolution of different slave systems. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars became critical of what they perceived as teleological narratives connecting slave systems and post-emancipation race relations. Carl Degler (Reference Degler1971, 92) for instance, concluded that slavery did not shape race relations in “fundamental” ways. In his comparative study of racist regimes in the United States and South Africa, John Cell (Reference Cell1982, xii) offered a similar formulation, arguing that slavery had “relatively little to do” with subsequent racial dynamics. Anthony Marx (Reference Marx1998, 8–9) agreed that slave systems “cannot directly explain” the shape of later racial orders. None of these authors disputed that some connection exists between slavery and race relations after emancipation, but they did not explore the nature and possible importance of these links.
Recent scholars dealing with this problem have noted the need to pay serious attention to the contradictory expectations and goals informing emancipation processes everywhere. Rebecca Scott emphasized the unpredictability of these processes in her landmark comparative study of Louisiana and Cuba, arguing that it is unlikely that we will be able to create “any simple global explanation” that accounts for different outcomes in how slave societies evolved after emancipation. “Neither structures nor struggles could fully determine the outcome,” she notes, thus the need to study how conflicts over rights, standing, and resources produced different results in each case (Scott Reference Scott2005, 263, 264). These conflicts were framed by preexistent practices, understandings, and expectations, however, so it remains necessary to research them under slavery in order to establish possible continuities and innovations. Andrews (Reference Andrews2004, 8) offers a possible analytical path forward by suggesting patterns that could become the subject of specific future research: “forms of behavior that originated under slavery… proved unexpectedly durable and long lasting, and continued to shape the course of Afro-Latin American history… in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
Among those behaviors that proved to be remarkably resilient are African-based cultural practices. There is a growing literature concerning the reproduction and longevity of African cultures in colonial societies, provoked by longstanding debates concerning creolization (Mintz and Price Reference Mintz and Price1992; Thornton Reference Thornton1998; Sweet Reference Sweet2003; Bennett Reference Bennett2003, Reference Bennett2009). As discussed in several of the chapters in this volume, some of these cultural practices came to be identified as foundational elements of national identity in the twentieth century, although it is not always clear why some were selected while others were not. Processes of cultural nationalization were invariably mediated by stylization, appropriation, and filtering efforts that made popular cultures legible and acceptable to the middle classes. Are we to interpret this primarily as an expression of the endurance and creativity of Afro-Latin Americans, or as successful elite cooptation strategies that deprive Afrodescendants of their own culture? What are the social and political implications of transforming Afro-diasporic symbols and artifacts into national symbols? Do these processes lead to the commodification and depoliticization of such symbols (Hanchard Reference Hanchard1994), or do they create opportunities for political action, empowerment, and community formation, not to mention sustenance, visibility, and mobility for practitioners (Moore Reference Moore1997; Alberto Reference Alberto2011; Hertzman Reference Hertzman2013; Putnam Reference Putnam2013; Abreu Reference Abreu2015)? These debates are not strictly academic, as activists have frequently pondered the effectiveness of cultural spaces to make demands for racial justice. For example, in countries where open discussions of racism and discrimination have not been welcomed, such as in Cuba or in Brazil during the dictatorship, art became a platform to discuss issues of racial justice (Fernandes Reference Fernandes2006; de la Fuente Reference De la Fuente2008, 2010, Reference De la Fuente2013, Reference De la Fuente2017; Alberto Reference Alberto2011; Gaiter Reference Gaiter and Braham2015).
The long-term impact of colonial processes also points to another important area of research: comparisons with indigenous populations. Years ago, Peter Wade (Reference Wade1997, 39) called for the need to integrate “blacks and indians into the same theoretical frame of reference, while recognizing the historical differences between them.” As he details in his chapter in this volume, significant scholarship has been produced on Afro-indigenous relations in the last few years, including work on communities of mixed African and indigenous origins, such as the Garifuna of Central America. But taking seriously Wade’s (Reference Wade1997, 35) insight about the “different location of blacks and indians in the political and imagined space of the nation” means that we are faced with contrasting histories of inclusion and citizenship that merit further attention. The dissimilar location of so-called Indians and blacks in colonial societies is well known. To what degree did these configurations create dissimilar platforms for citizenship and belonging after independence (Larson Reference Larson2004; Sanders Reference Sanders2004; Gotkowitz Reference Gotkowitz2011)? Why have ideologies of mestizaje and racial harmony been produced in some countries but not others? Scholars interested in those ideologies would benefit by crossing the traditional divide between indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants. Furthermore, as Andrews notes in his discussion of inequality, indigenous poverty rates are consistently higher than Afrodescendant rates in the region (with the exception of Uruguay). Why? “Colonial tracings,” to use Florencia Mallon’s (Reference Mallon and Moya2011, 281) expression, can be found in the histories of both indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples, but they seem to operate in different ways.
These questions and agendas are not just about reconstructing the past. The field of Afro-Latin American studies is deeply implicated in current struggles for racial justice and its existence is inseparable from past mobilization efforts. A richer understanding of these histories of race, culture, nation, and mobilization is indispensable for envisioning futures of equality, respect, coexistence, and belonging.
