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Blacks And Blackness In Central America : Between Race And Place
Paperback Edition: 1
The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African roots and participation in favour of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas.
The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region's history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed race majorities as "Indo-Hispanic," or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of a region considered by many to be one of the most successful cases of African American achievement, political participation, and power following independence from Spain in 1821.
Contributors: Rina Caceres Gomez; Ronald Harpelle; Juliet Hooker; Catherine Komisaruk; Russell Lohse; Paul Lokken; Mauricio Melendez Obando; Karl H. Offen; Lara Putnam
Pages : 416
Publisher : Duke University Press
Publication date : 2010-10-18
Subjects: Non-fiction, Humanities, Social Sciences, History, Sociology, Slavery & Abolition Of Slavery, Black & Asian Studies