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The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves reproduced in the dominant discourse of their national society. The contributors approach various forms of blackness within the fluctuation of political, economic, and social processes embedded in particular time/space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional, national, and transnational dimensions.
Identities, whatever they may be, cannot be defined once and for all in fixed or essentialist terms as if they were unchanging or frozen in time and space. If, as this book proposes, identities are fluid, it is because they are constantly enacted and reenacted, performed anew within specific situations, and within changing socioeconomic and political contexts that provide sites for their negotiations and renegotiations, definitions and redefinitions. Thus, the book approaches black identities as performances.
Table des matières
Introduction
CelebrationsFestive Rituals, Religious Associations, and Ethnic Reaffirmation of Black Andalusians: Antecedents of the Black Confraternities and Cabildos in the Americas by Isidoro Moreno
Presence of Blackness and Representations of Jewishness in the Afro-Esmeraldian Celebrations of the "Semana Santa" (Ecuador) by Jean Muteba Rahier
Re-/Presenting Black Female Identity in Brazil: "Filhas d'Oxum" in Bahia Carnival by Carole Boyce Davies
Samba Schools: The Logic of Orgy and Blackness in Rio de Janeiro by Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos
On the Apparent Carnivalization of Literature from the French Caribbean by Maryse Condé
Social ArenasKwanzaa and the U.S. Ethnic Mosaic by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
Identity, Arena, and Performance: Being West Indian in the San Francisco Bay Area by Percy C. Hintzen
Uptown Ladies and Downtown Women: Female Representations of Class and Color in Jamaica by Gina Ulysse
Representations of Blackness in Colombian Popular Music by Peter Wade
African and Native American PerspectivesIn Memory of the Slaves: An African View of the Diaspora in the Americas by Peter Sutherland
Imagery of Blackness in Indigenous Myth, Discourse, and Ritual by Norman E. Whitten, Jr., and Rachel Corr
Bibliography
Index
A propos de l'auteur
JEAN MUTEBA RAHIER is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African-New World Studies at Florida International University.
