Less than 5% of enslaved Africans destined for the Western Hemisphere went to the United States, during the transatlantic slave trade. The vast majority, instead, went to Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet we know very little about the lives and histories of the Afro-descendants whose ancestors landed on the shores of places like Brazil, Colombia and Cuba.
The aim of this seminar is to examine black identity and politics in contemporary Latin America, with a specific focus on South America. The course will explore the conditions that gave rise to the African Diaspora in this region, including the particularities of transatlantic slave trade, and unique approaches to incorporating/marginalizing the former enslaved population into the social, political and economic life of their countries. The second seminar will analyze how these different contexts laid the foundation for different kinds of expressions of black identity, culture and politics over the course of the 20th century. In the final seminar session, we analyze the migration of Afro-Latin Americans to places like Florida and New York, as well as the corresponding emergence of movements asserting afro-latin@/afro-latinx identity in these new contexts. Throughout the seminar we analyze how blackness intersects with other axes of power and hierarchy, namely class and gender.
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Tue, Oct 1, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Oct 2, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Thu, Oct 3, 20196:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Dr. Tianna S. Paschel is the Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on analyzing the intersection of racial ideology, politics, and globalization in Latin America and the United States. She has published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Du Bois Review, SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies as well as various edited volumes. She is also the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects, which draws on ethnographic and archival methods to explore the shift in the 1990s from ideas of unmarked universal citizenship to multicultural citizenship regimes and the recognition of specific rights for black populations by Latin American states. It is the winner of numerous awards including the Herbert Jacob Book Award of the Law and Society Association and the Barrington Moore Book Award of the American Sociological Association. Professor Paschel is also the co-editor – along with Petra Rivera-Rideau and Jennifer Jones – of Afro-Latin@s in Movement, an interdisciplinary volume that explores transnationalism and blackness in the Americas. She is currently working on three major research projects, one that explores the transnational making of ideas of Brazil as a racial paradise, another race and inequality in media representation in Latin America, and a research project with Professor Cristina Mora that explores racial attitudes and economic precariousness in California. Professor Paschel is a Ford Fellow, member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, the Council of the Law Section and the Human Rights Section of ASA, the Executive Council of the Brazilian Studies Association, and the Steering Committee of the Network of Anti-Racist Action and Research (RAIAR).