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

Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the 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 revolución 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).

1. The Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas - Ecuador: Creolization/Malleability in the Time of Interculturalismo and Neo-Essentialism
2. Presence of Blackness and Representations of Jews in the Afro-Esmeraldian Celebrations of the Semana Santa, Ecuador
3. From Panacea for Harmonious Race Relations to Ideological Tool for Oppression and National Identity Imagination: Reflections from the Andes on Mestizaje through Time and Space
4. Afrodescendants, the Multicultural Turn and the 'New' Latin American Constitutions and Other Special Legislations: Particularities of the Andean Region
by Jean Muteba Rahier and Mamyrah Dougé Prosper
5. A Glimpse at Afro-Ecuadorian Politics, Influences on and Participation in Constitutional Processes, and State Corporatism
6. Blackness, the Racial-Spatial Order at Work, and Beauty Contest Politics: Señoras, Mujeres, Blanqueamiento, and the Negra Permitida
7. Stereotypes of Hypersexuality and the Embodiment of Blackness: Some Narratives of Female Sexuality in Quito, Ecuador
8. Fútbol and the (Tri-)Color of the Ecuadorian Nation: Ideological and Visual (Dis)Continuities of Black Otherness from Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism