PSCI6120 - Politics and Social Movements in Contemporary Afro-Latin America

Over the past two decades there has been an explosion of research into Afro-Latin American populations in South America and the Caribbean. During this period a generation of scholars who were largely unsatisfied with the research methods and normative agendas of many scholars, activists and politicians of prior eras began to pose distinct research questions and methodological approaches to various subject matter. Afro-Latin identification and identity ( as both separate from and entangled with national identity) is a major theme in the new literature. Race, racism and inequality, Afro-Latin involvement in social movements, political parties and other forms of political articulation have also been prominent themes. In previous eras, scholars largely emphasized various iterations of purportedly racial and ostensibly cultural mixture such as Mestizaje and Democracia Racial to explain why race and racism did not play a prominent role in social and political mobilization. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, however, have found ways to identify attitudes, behaviors , demographic and socio-economic indicators that belie imagery and ideologies of social and political equality achieved through miscegenation (cultural and physical) in Latin America.