Jean Muteba Rahier – författare

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

Global Circuits of Blackness is a sophisticated analysis of the interlocking diasporic connections between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A diverse and gifted group of scholars delve into the contradictions of diasporic identity by examining at close range the encounters of different forms of blackness converging on the global scene. Contributors examine the many ways blacks have been misrecognized in a variety of contexts. They also explore how, as a direct result of transnational networking and processes of friction, blacks have deployed diasporic consciousness to interpellate forms of white supremacy that have naturalized black inferiority, inhumanity, and abjection. Various essays document the antagonism between African Americans and Africans regarding heritage tourism in West Africa, discuss the interaction between different forms of blackness in Toronto's Caribana Festival, probe the impact of the Civil Rights movement in America on diasporic communities elsewhere, and assess the anxiety about HIV and AIDS within black communities. The volume demonstrates that diaspora is a floating revelation of black consciousness that brings together, in a single space, dimensions of difference in forms and content of representations, practices, and meanings of blackness. Diaspora imposes considerable flexibility in what would otherwise be place-bound fixities. Contributors are Marlon M. Bailey, Jung Ran Forte, Reena N. Goldthree, Percy C. Hintzen, Lyndon Phillip, Andrea Queeley, Jean Muteba Rahier, StÉphane Robolin, and Felipe Smith.

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves reproduced in the dominant discourse of their national society. The contributors approach various forms of blackness within the fluctuation of political, economic, and social processes embedded in particular time/space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional, national, and transnational dimensions.Identities, whatever they may be, cannot be defined once and for all in fixed or essentialist terms as if they were unchanging or frozen in time and space. If, as this book proposes, identities are fluid, it is because they are constantly enacted and reenacted, performed anew within specific situations, and within changing socioeconomic and political contexts that provide sites for their negotiations and renegotiations, definitions and redefinitions. Thus, the book approaches black identities as performances.

The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves reproduced in the dominant discourse of their national society. The contributors approach various forms of blackness within the fluctuation of political, economic, and social processes embedded in particular time/space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional, national, and transnational dimensions.Identities, whatever they may be, cannot be defined once and for all in fixed or essentialist terms as if they were unchanging or frozen in time and space. If, as this book proposes, identities are fluid, it is because they are constantly enacted and reenacted, performed anew within specific situations, and within changing socioeconomic and political contexts that provide sites for their negotiations and renegotiations, definitions and redefinitions. Thus, the book approaches black identities as performances.