Blackness in the Andes ― Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism

Bringing together contemporary political trends with questions of race, space, and sexuality, Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Andean populations within the context of the region's recent, pivotal history and the "Latin American multicultural turn" of the past two decades. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, this book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; mestizaje and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural mestizaje' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the revolucion ciudadana (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador.

Jean Muteba Rahier is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University, USA, where he is also Director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program. Formerly, he was the editor of Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. He is the author of Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival (2012) and the editor of four books, including Black Social Movements in Latin America: From Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism (2012) and Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (2003).