Jean Muteba Rahier

Percy Hintzen

Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States

Problematizing Blackness

This anthology offers a comparative approach for the study of performances of African diaspora identities in various locales of the "Black Atlantic." Articles discuss the spatial dimensions of blackness; the relations between blackness, gender constructs, and social classes; Native American views on blackness; and the use of "obscenity" as a tool of black resistance.

Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities

Felipe Smith

Percy C. Hintzen

Percy C. Hintzen is a professor of African American Studies and the chair of the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of West Indians in the West: Self Migrant Community.

Interrogating the African Diaspora

Global Circuits of Blackness

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.

Jean Muteba Rahier

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