Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean

"An important contribution to the ongoing scholarly examination and debate about race, identity, and citizenship in the Caribbean and Latin America."--Cary F. Fraser, Pennsylvania State UniversityThis collection of essays offers a comprehensive overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rich in theoretical framework and close textual analysis, these essays offer new paradigms and approaches to both reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states.The contributors are drawn from a variety of fields, including literary criticism, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The contributors to this book abandon the traditional approaches that study racialized oppression in Latin America only from the standpoint of its impact on either Indians or people of African descent. Instead they examine colonialism's domination and legacy in terms of both the political power it wielded and the symbolic instruments of that oppression.The volume's scope extends from the Southern Cone to the Andean region, Mexico, and the Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. It contests many of the traditional givens about Latin America, including governance and the nation state, the effects of globalization, the legacy of the region's criollo philosophers and men of letters, and postulations of harmonious race relations. As dictatorships give way to democracies in a variety of unprecedented ways, this book offers a necessary and needed examination of the social transformations in the region. Jerome Branche |Gislene Aparecida | Denise Y. Arnold | Carolle Charles | Michael Handelsman | H. Adlai Murdoch | Laurence Prescott | Jos Rabasa | Kelvin Santiago-Valles | Marcia Stephenson | Gustavo Verdesio From meticulous oblivion to unexpected return : the variable fate of indigenous people in the Uruguayan imaginary of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries / Gustavo Verdesio Coloring the social structure : racial politics during the Duvalierist dictatorial regime of 1957-87 / Carolle Charles The imagined republic of Puerto Rican populism in world/ historical context : the poetics of plantation fantasies and the petit-coloniality of Criollo Blanchitude, 1914-48 / Kelvin Santiago-Valles Racism and its masks in Brazil : on racism and the idea of harmony / Gislene Aparecida dos Santos Revolutionary spiritualities in Chiapas today : immanent history and the comparative frame in subaltern studies / José Rabasa New cartographies of the Bolivian state in the context of the Constituent Assembly, 2006-2007 / Denise Y. Arnold Savage emergence : toward a decolonial Aymara methodology for cultural survival / Marcia Stephenson Race, ethnicity, and nation in Manuel Zapata Olivella's ¡Levántate mulato! : rethinking identity in Latin America / Laurence Prescott Afro-centrism as an intercultural force in Ecuador / Michael Handelsman Creole counterdiscourses and French departmental hegemony : Reclaiming "here" from "there" / H. Adlai Murdoch. A collection of essays that offer an overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. It offers fresh paradigms and approaches to reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states.