This volume considers the African Diaspora through the underexplored Afro-Latino experience in the Caribbean and South America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches such as feminism and Atlantic studies, the authors explore the production of historical and contemporary identities and cultural practices within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America illustrates how far the fields of Afro-Latino and African Diaspora studies have advanced beyond the Herskovits and Frazier debates of the 1940s. The book’s arguments complicate Herskovits’ insistence on Black culture being an exclusive reflection of African survivals, as well as Frazier’s counter-claim of African American culture being a result of slavery and colonialism. This collection of thought-provoking essays extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Latinos are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora.

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole. Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represents a call for multidisciplinary, collaborative, and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.

Antonio Olliz Boyd is an emeritus professor of Latin American literature at Temple University. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from Grorgetown University, and a BA from Long Island University. Dr. Olliz Boyd has published various essays on Afro Latino aesthetics in literature in volumes, such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers; Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon; Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity; Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays among others, as well as articles on Afro Latino literary criticism in various refereed journals. --Book Jacket.

This anthology presents a new study of the worldwide African diaspora by bringing together diverse, multidisciplinary scholarship to address the connectedness of Black subject identities, experiences, issues, themes, and topics, applying them dynamically to diverse locations of the Blackworld—Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. The book underscores three dimensions of African diaspora study. First is a global approach to the African diaspora, showing how globalism underscores the distinctive role that Africa plays in contributing to world history. Second is the extension of African diaspora study in a geographical scope to more robust inclusions of not only the African continent but also to uncharted paths and discoveries of lesser-known diaspora experiences and identities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Third is the illustration of universal unwritten cultural representations of humanities in the African diasporas that show the distinctive humanities’ disciplinary representations of Black diaspora imaginaries and subjectivities. The contributing authors inductively apply these themes to focus the reader’s attention on contemporary localized issues and historical arenas of the African diaspora. They engage their findings to critically analyze the broader norms and dimensions that characterize a given set of interrelated criteria that have come to establish parameters that increasingly standardize African diaspora studies.

This book brings together authors from different institutions and perspectives and from researchers specialising in different aspects of the experiences of the African Diaspora from Latin America. It creates an overview of the complexities of the lives of Black people over various periods of history, as they struggled to build lives away from Africa in societies that, in general, denied them the basic right of fully belonging, such as the right of fully belonging in the countries where, by choice or force of circumstance, they lived. Another Black Like Me thus presents a few notable scenes from the long history of Blacks in Latin America: as runaway slaves seen through the official documentation denouncing as illegal those who resisted captivity; through the memoirs of a slave who still dreamt of his homeland; reflections on the status of Black women; demands for citizenship and kinship by Black immigrants; the fantasies of Blacks in the United States about the lives of Blacks in Brazil; a case study of some of those who returned to Africa and had to build a new identity based on their experiences as slaves; and the abstract representations of race and color in the Caribbean. All of these provide the reader with a glimpse of complex phenomena that, though they cannot be generalized in a single definition of blackness in Latin America, share the common element of living in societies where the definition of blackness was flexible, there were no laws of racial segregation, and where the culture on one hand tolerates miscegenation, and on the other denies full recognition of rights to Blacks.

Shows regional Black history.

After generations of being rendered virtually invisible by the US academy in critical anthologies and literary histories, writing by Latin Americans of African ancestry has become represented by a booming corpus of intellectual and critical investigation. This volume aims to provide an introduction to the literary worlds and perceptions of national culture and identity of authors from Spanish-America, Brazil, and uniquely, Equatorial Guinea, thus contextually connecting Africa to the history of Spanish colonization. The importance of Latin America literature to the discipline of African Diaspora studies is immeasurable, and this edited collection provides a ripe cultural context for critical comparative analysis among the vast geographies that encompass African and African Diaspora studies. Scholars in the area of African Diaspora Studies, Black Studies, Latin American Studies, and American literature will be able to utilize the eleven essays in this edition to enhance classroom instruction and further academic research.

Imagine the tension that existed between the emerging nations and governments throughout the Latin American world and the cultural life of former enslaved Africans and their descendants. A world of cultural production, in the form of literature, poetry, art, music, and eventually film, would often simultaneously contravene or cooperate with the newly established order of Latin American nations negotiating independence and a new political and cultural balance. In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an autobiography on the slave experience in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region. All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

Beyond Slavery traces the enduring impact and legacy of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean in the modern era. In a rich set of essays, the volume explores the multiple ways that Africans have affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the region. The contributors engage readers interested in the African diaspora in a series of vigorous debates ranging from agency and resistance to transculturation, displacement, cross-national dialogue, and popular culture. Documenting the array of diverse voices of Afro-Latin Americans throughout the region, this interdisciplinary book brings to life both their histories and contemporary experiences.