Blackness in the Andes

Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism

J. Rahier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137272713
• eBook ISBN: 9781137272720
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines, in Andean national contexts, the impacts of the 'Latin American multicultural turn' of the past two decades on Afro Andean cultural politics, emphasizing both transformations and continuities.

Chapter 1

The Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas—Ecuador: Creolization/Malleability in the Time of Interculturalismo and Neo-Essentialism1

Blackness as Processes of Creolization

In an ethnohistorical perspective, blackness in the Americas is understood here as “processes of creolization.” These processes refer to cultural fragments from various origins, as well as to original creations, that have mingled in particular ways to be reshaped within various time-and-space contexts, and have become singular cultural traditions associated with blackness. The premise is that cultural practices of Afrodescendants—communities of descendants of slaves, as opposed to recent African or Afrodescendant immigrants—are always the product of a history of cultural exchanges that first took shape in contexts characterized by colonialism and varying degrees of “otherization” and exploitation, if not simply abject domination. These African diaspora “traditions” have never stopped undergoing changes and transformations.2

I illustrate the value of such an understanding of African diaspora cultures with the exploration of a poetic form, the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas (Province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador). While I establish their Spanish origin, I also underline the fundamental differences that exist between the Décimas and the Spanish glosses, or glosas, they come from. The differences explain why I prefer to categorize the Spanish glosses and the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas as two distinct poetic genres.

The Décima, a traditional oral poetry recited mostly by Afro-Esmeraldian men, has as its formal origin a written poetry—the gloss (la glosa)—that was quite popular during the Renaissance in Spain and in Europe in general. The tradition of the Décimas also exists in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia (mostly in the Departments of Chocó and Nariño) and in Peru. In the latter country, they are called Décimas de pie quebrado (“Décimas of broken foot”) and are sometimes sung and accompanied by musical instruments.

To understand the history of the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas as a poetic genre, it is absolutely necessary to pay attention to details of the history of Spanish society, literature, and colonies that led to the transformation of the European (Spanish) gloss into the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas—one of the most characteristic institutions of “Afro-Esmeraldian culture” and oral tradition. By their very nature, the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas contradict the “ethnic absolutism” of Afrocentric writers, such as Molefi Asante. These writers choose to understand blackness as an “entity” frozen in time and space, which implies the adoption of a concept of self as racialized, essentialized, and fundamentally monolithic, or “African”:

One cannot study Africans in the United States or Brazil or Jamaica without some appreciation for the historical and cultural significance of Africa as source and origin. A reactionary posture which claims Africology as “African Slave Studies” is rejected outright because it disconnects the African in America from thousands of years of history and tradition. Thus, if one concentrates on studying Africans in the inner cities of the Northeast United States, which is reasonable, it must be done with the idea in the back of the mind that one is studying African people, not “made-in-America Negroes” without historical depth. (Asante 1990, 15)

This chapter is at a long distance from Asante’s disregard for the very cultural processes of malleability and plasticity that I see associated with the cultural history of the African diaspora in the Americas. The expressions “creole,” “creolized,” and “creolization” have been used numerous times, in different places and by different people, to refer to very diverse populations and cultural institutions. A recurrent connotation of these terms, which justifies their application to the Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas, is “born in the Americas,” following the contact between different cultural tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures & Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Afro-Esmeraldian Décimas—Ecuador: Creolization/Malleability in the Time of Interculturalismo and Neo-Essentialism
• Chapter 2 Presence of Blackness and Representations of Jews in the Afro-Esmeraldian Celebrations of Semana Santa1
• Chapter 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
• Chapter 4 Afrodescendants, the Multicultural Turn and the “New” Latin American Constitutions and Other Special Legislations: Particularities of the Andean Region
• Chapter 5 A Glimpse at Afro-Ecuadorian Politics, Influences on and Participation in Constitutional Processes, and State Corporatism1
• Chapter 6 Blackness, the Racial-Spatial Order at Work, and Beauty Contest Politics: Señoras, Mujeres, Blanqueamiento, and the Negra Permitida1
• Chapter 7 Stereotypes of Hypersexuality and the Embodiment of Blackness: Some Narratives of Female Sexuality in Quito, Ecuador1
• Chapter 8 Fútbol and the (Tri-)Color of the Ecuadorian Nation: Ideological and Visual (Dis-)Continuities of Black Otherness from Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism
• Appendix
• Notes
• Cited References
• Index