Contesting the Images of Oppression: Indigenous Views of Blackness in the Americas
Whitten, Norman & Corr, Rachel
"Race" is not a biological given, but a malleable carrier of historical and cosmological meanings. In the mid fifteenth century, sailors under the com- mand of the Portuguese entrepreneur Prince...
...For an extended discussion of imagery of blackness in the Americas see Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...According to oral history, Salasacans collaborated with the black coastal soldiers to disguise President Eloy Alfaro as an indigenous woman so that he could safely travel northward through the Sierra to arrive in Quito-where, despite these efforts, he was assassinated...
...This argument is spelled out in much greater detail in Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...Symbolic constructions generate images, patterns of thought and emotion that influence the way people see themselves and others...
...At the bottom of class-status relationships, flowing downward from the wealthy and fair skinned to the poor, were those people generally represented in Latin America as negro, on one side, and indio, on the other...
...As Prince Henry's sailors color- coded their chattel, Africans previously known on the Iberian Peninsula as Jelof, Biafara, Bran, Berbesi, Mandinga, Badl, Fula, and all their greater diversity, became resignified as "black...
...8. Marc de Civrieux, WATUNNA: An Orinoco Creation Cycle, edited and translated by David M. Guss (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980), p. 156...
...Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants ofAllah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New York University Press, 1998...
...Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995...
...Vincent Island in the Lesser Antilles through interbreeding between Arawak-speaking native peoples known as the "Island Carib" and black cimarrones and perhaps slaves...
...The quality of zambo had no place in the Euro-American colonial hybridity theories that mixed civilized with savage to create a pliable mestizo "race" of New Worldborn Creoles...
...2. The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 149294, transcribed and translated into English with notes by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr...
...They contest the pejorative and stereotypic representation, even as they may use it to dramatic effect in the enactment of their myriad system of identity politics...
...Indians" they became...
...Historically, it has been a powerful category for self-ascription for those who resisted colonial rule, founded free villages, and raided-and traded with-the plantations, towns and settlements that dotted the profit-making colonies...
...Nelson Estupifhn Bass, "Canci6n del nifio negro y del incendio," Canto Negro por la Luz: Poemas para Negros y Blancos (Esmeraldas: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1954), p. 50, 53...
...As the formal division between Spaniards and "Indians" became ever more rigid in the Spanish colonies, the traffic in black slaves increased exponentially, and the movements toward self-liberation accelerated...
...Spain organized its colonies by sharply dividing the "Republic of Spaniards" from the "Republic of Indians...
...166-167...
...as the Saramaka, Garifuna, Miskitu, or black esmer- 114-a n, Cinr tran flr-* 1 is not represented as a biological given, but as a malleable carrier of historical and cosmological meanings...
...Both of these mixtures were governed by the racist construct of "hybridity" wherein the higher status in racialist rank (white, espafiol) gave superior genetic stock to the lower (indio and negro) to serve thereby as a "civilizing" cultural factor...
...In this representation the blacks represent soldiers wno guard me treasures brought by the Kings for the sacred infant...
...Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially pp...
...We use the term to refer to the language group that is wide-flung in South America around the periphery of Greater Amazonia, from the Orinoco River Region of Venezuela to the XingO River Region of Brazil...
...W e raise the question as to whether we might learn something new by paying more attention to indigenous concepts of blackness...
...and "Indians" they are...
...MichelRolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995...
...For information on the use of the label cannibal, see Michael PalenciaRoth, "The Cannibal Law of 1503," in Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis, eds., Early Images of the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1993) pp...
...Wayalumba is self-liberated...
...3. John Wynter, "1492: A New World View," in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, pp...
...They are terms that embody the historical association of blackness with self-liberation...
...See also David M. Guss, To Weave and Sing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989...
...182-199...
...169-198...
...We begin our search in Venezuela...
...2 0 As Michael Taussig once put it: "From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation...
...Vol XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JuNE 200125 (hybrid nN nid) L I Vol XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2001 25REPORT ON RACE Young women from Amazonian Venezuela's Yekuana indigenous He was Kahiuru's servant...
...1 4 Wayalumba Supai lives in a natural entangleVol XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2001 27 0 a 8 27 Vol XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2001REPORT ON RACE ment of spiny ferns deep in the Amazonian rain forest...
...251258...
...6 Black and Indian mixes, by contrast, produced a socially constructed racial category called zambo, or "black indian," a cultural status that permeated colonial accounts of dangerous people-a danger said to emerge from the lack of genetic mediation of whiteness...
...They were granted no collective social position, no "republic," but they constructed their own...
...Far from being opposites, blackness and indigenousness have been inextricably entangled through history...
...They use their swords to hold back the trickster devilsdiabloguna-who try to capture their souls at certain crossroads...
...In Quito, Ecuador, we continue to find that indigenous performances reveal alternative representations of "race...
...That's how the Murunmatto, the mestizos [mulattos], were born...
...Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider, eds., SymbolicAnthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 3. 19...
...The spirit (supai in Quichua) is of the various epochs of cultural time and dimensions of cultural space...
...to listen to them and to understand their messages requires considerable reflection...
...One of the best known and most publicized of these is the Mama Negra (Black Mother) festival held in the city of Latacunga in November...
...See, e.g...
...Key markers in the Iberian paradigm of dominance look like this: Here, according to social constructions implanted in the Americas by the Iberian colonizers, white genes mingling with Indian genes produced a "half-breed" race of mestizos, while white genes "mixing" with those of black Africans produced mulatos...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, Mineria, Descendencia y Orfebreria Artesanal Litoral Pacifico (Colombia) (Bogota: Universidad Nacional, 1974...
...Both of the authors do research in indigenous communities in Ecuador, Corr in the Andes and Whitten in Upper Amazonia...
...The Arawak were the people, known as Taino, first encountered by Columbus in the Bahamas on the 12th of October 1492...
...1), Arlene Torres and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds...
...They are represented as slaves to the Fafiuru, the evil Spaniards, and as soldiers in the Spanish army as well as the army of liberation...
...We find, in many indigenous stories, legends and celebrations, community, not a contrast between black and indigenous people, but rather a continuity of representation from indigenous to black...
...2), Blackness in Latin American and the Caribbean: Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics...
...Representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live...
...With the Fafiuru came a people called Kurumankomo, the black people...
...1 7 Or as Karl Marx once put it, "...As people express their lives, so they are...
...Canelos Quichua, or from those who fled to and mixed s is fused with with indigenous people such f-liberation...
...53), pp...
...The Taino designation for such a refuge zone-haiti-became the name of the western side of the island of Hispaniola-Haiti-when the peopie who lived there successfully revolted against French colonialism in 1804...
...icomo yana...
...Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993...
...icomo zambo...
...Contesting the Images of Oppression 1. See "Reconnaissance of Africa," Oxford Atlas of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp...
...Since 1492, indigenous American legacies and destinies have intertwined with representations and identities of blackness and whiteness...
...Each negro, as the dancers are called, is paired with a dofia, "woman of esteem," who is portrayed by a strong young man or boy dressed as a Salasacan woman...
...4 At this time the idea of distinct imagined systems of biocultural "beings"-white, black, Indian- justified a vast colonial system of white supremacy and black and indigenous subservience...
...1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp...
...The imagery of cimarronaje among the Noanam and Emberd is that of mysterious, free, dangerous, spiritual, but also corporeal beings-their footprints can still be seen-completely familiar with the deep forest and committed to free life beyond the confines or reaches of white authority...
...Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities...
...Rather, blackne By his drumming and by his images of se dancing he emerges as ht f l dI or negro...
...and Rachel Corr, "Imagery of 'Blackness' in Indigenous Myth, Discourse, and Ritual," in Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999), pp...
...1 8 We find it highly significant that indigenous people do not represent "slavery" as the embodiment of blackness...
...The negro in such performances fuses the imagery of black and indigenous liberation...
...El mestizaje, "the blending," or "the hybridizing," or "the cross breeding," refers here to the racialized embodiment of mixed peoples that signals an imagined community of lesser national beings for the white elites...
...The portrayal is often that of a soldier in the army of Eloy Alfaro Delgado during the time of the great Liberal Revolution of the late nineteenth century-the nlfn arad, it ia vnmetim called, of 1894-95-that caused a national social transformation...
...The reflexive effort begins with a reading of the texts and listening to the voices of those who survived their socially constructed banishment to the racialized antipodes of society...
...Signification often involves a word that names the object of representation...
...They were good, poor people too...
...Garlfuna (plural Garinagu), which these people call themselves, derives from "Kalinago," the name by which Columbus came to know the "Carib" of Eastern Venezuela and Guyana...
...Representations of blackness in Pacific and Amazonian mythologies are also enacted in Andean indigenous performances...
...Frank Salomon, "Killing the Yumbo: A Ritual Drama of Northern Quito," in Norman E. Whitten, Jr., ed., Cultural Transformations and Ethnicityin Modern Ecuador, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) pp...
...Vol...
...Images of different black peoples from both Spanish Catholic and Salasacan historical experiences are fused...
...Representation is the way by which people are signified by others...
...They shout: "ihoyaad...
...Race relations are symbolically constructed within cultural contexts...
...Runa is the Quichua word for "fully human being...
...4. Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 1646...
...2 And so the Admiral named all the inhabitants of the Americas by one term-indios ("Indians")-marking them as socially and morally deficient and establishing European hegemony over all of their lands and labor...
...Rather, it offers cultural images of "blackness" as positive social constructions of representation and identity...
...He emerges from this entanglement with a different kind Indigenous pe represent "sla of drum, which he beats to embodiment attract children to him...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, "Gold Mining and Descent: GOelmambl, Nariho," in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, Vol...
...7. European conquerors used the term "Carib" to label people as cannibals (canibales, canimas, and caribes) to justify rape, enslavement, and war...
...the Miskitu-often known as zambos- got their name through their alliance with the British, from whom they obtained muskets which they used against the Spanish...
...The native inhabitants of the "Precolumbian Americas" could not escape the stigmatic systems of representation bound to the paradigm that constructed them as indios...
...Real people create new modernities...
...Everything should be profitable...
...Indians" they were named...
...He initiated commercial slavery in the Americas, and tried to show wealthy and powerful Europeans how indios could be easily outwitted for the wealth of their land, and how their bodies could be turned into substantial profit...
...He is very similar to the conceptualization of the cimarr6n in Emberi-Noanam and Chachi cosmology...
...Lots of them ran off to the jungle and mixed with the laranavi [the "good Spaniards," with whom the Yekuana had trade relations...
...The central performers refer to themselves as Quito Runa...
...Among other events celebrated by Mama Negra is the liberation of black slave miners in Cotopaxi by indigenous people from that province...
...They didn't give them any money...
...There we encounter many concepts of blackness (lo negro) very different from the dominant, hegemonic constructs...
...He NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS "8 0 a a 24REPORT ON RACE tried to open the portals of wealth through the acquisition of gold, pearls and spices...
...2 1 In South America it is from the indigenous and Afro-Latin American people that hegemonic representations are being overturned...
...The Yekuana are also known by the Arawak word Maquiritare (Makiritare...
...In the story, black people are associated with the black currasow, Kurunkumo...
...In the mid fifteenth century, sailors under the com- mand of the Portuguese entrepreneur Prince Henry the Navigator began purchasing human chattel at ports in West Africa and shipping them to Portugal for sale throughout Europe...
...reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc, Westport, CT Diario of 1492-93, he wrote: "Todo deve ser cosa provechosa...
...Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer, and Dicey Taylor, eds., Taino: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean (New York: The Monacellia Press, El Museo del Barrio, 1997...
...icomo negro...
...Both words mean "river people" or "canoe people...
...Eloy Alfaro is considered in Salasaca, as elsewhere in Ecuador, to be a liberator of black and indigenous people...
...The portrayal of the liberation of blacks from slavery in indigenous historical consciousness is dramatized in other Andean cultural enactments...
...Libre and cimarr6n are two key Emberd and Noanam categories for the merger of human and spirit power...
...7 It does not follow the nationalist ideology of mestizaje characteristic of Venezuela...
...Here we find what Stephanie Kane calls a "scale of sentient beings" that includes people or beings called libres (free) and cimarrones (self-liberated...
...1 3 Throughout Andean Ecuador the image of blackness in the context of indigenous festivity and indigenous artistic portrayal fuses images of different black personages across many centuries...
...These cimarrones may be other Emberd or Noanam, or blacks or zambos...
...A celebration called the Yumbada offers a striking imagery that challenges the notion of "el mestizaje...
...1 6 Confusion exists in the social sciences and the humanities about all of this, and scholars frequently conflate "identity" with "representation...
...In his Norman Whitten teaches anthropology and directs the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
...They have our color...
...1 2 In Salasaca, Andean Ecuador, indigenous festivals transform the figure of the black from one epoch to the 26 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 4 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON RACE next...
...They became the racial antipodes of the Americas...
...1 1 In Ecuador, historian P. Rafael Savoia traces a migration of selfliberated mixed black-indigenous (zambo) people from Esmeraldas to Bahia de Cardquez, where they continued the maritime trade for which the indigenous people of the area were famous, after the virtual demise of the native Manabi following the European conquest...
...5. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 2nd ed...
...1 Fifty years later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus, the first profit-seeking European slaver in the Americas, claimed to have reached the gateway to Asian markets...
...black yesterday, today and tomorrow,) Algunos creen insultarme (Some believe they insult me) gritdndome mi color (mocking my color) mds yo mismo lo pregono (but I myself proclaim it) con orgullofrente al sol: (with pride in the face of the sun:) Negro he sido, negro soy, (Black I have been, black I am,) negro vengo, negro voy, (black I come, black I go,) negro bien negro nact (black real black I was born,) negro negro he de vivir (black black I must live,) y como negro morir (and as black must die...
...One drama of the Morenada enacts a rebellion against the caporal, the black slavemaster...
...In reading texts ople do not from the Yekuana, Emberi, very" as the Noanam, Chachi, Quito Runa, Salasaca Quichua, of blackness...
...Themes similar to those in Yekuana myth and cosmology about the forces of evil and good in contemporary life can be found in the stories told by the Noanam and Emberd of the Dari6n region of Panama and in the Pacific lowlands of western Colombia and Ecuador...
...Vol...
...There can be no doubt about the affirmation of the identity of blackness in his poem-negro soy, negro voy (black I am, black I go)-it is first person, publicly personal, declarative, poetic, and moving: Negro, negro, renegrido, (Black, black, blackened) negro, hermano del carbon, (black, brother of charcoal,) negro de negros nacido, (black of blacks born,) negro ayer mariana y hoy...
...The sixteenth-century Spanish image of the Moors is also represented, as are nineteenth-century black troops of the wars of liberation...
...These terms were applied initially by Columbus-Bearer of Christ and Admiral of the Ocean Sea-as part of his claim to have reached India by sailing west in the Atlantic and on into the Caribbean to "Japan" (Cipango, the Island of Cuba...
...He had witnessed the expansion in the Portuguesesponsored African slave trade, and learned from it...
...The late Nina S. de Friedemann found that contemporary legends of the black artisans of Gilelmambi, southwestern Colombia-who still produce gold and guanin filigree-tell of how they took over the artistic work of native people when the latter died out...
...Carballo, Antologia de Pensamiento Politico, Socialy Econ6mico de America Latina (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura HispAnica, edici6n Justina Sarabia, 1989...
...The fiesta of Caporales is associated with the Catholic feast days of the Three Kings and the baby Jesus...
...1-26...
...and Arlene Torres, eds...
...During the Yumbada the prominent dramatic types are those of the white prioste (festival sponsor) offering the fiesta to the Catholic Church, the indigenous Yumbo from the forested Andean slopes and the black molecaiia (sugar-cane grinder) from the low, hot rainforest of coastal Esmeraldas province...
...Rachel Corr is an assistant professor of anthro- pology at the Honors College, Florida Atlantic University Portions of this article are excerpted from Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, edited by Jean Muteba Rahier Copyright 01999 by Jean Muteba Rahier...
...Jean Muteba Rahier, "Introduction," in Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, p. xiv...
...Indigenous peoples and populations of African descent, positioned by Europeans at the bottom of both class and ethnic hierarchies, acquired the stigmatic, opposing labels indio and negro as the embodiments of opposite versions of themselves...
...Wayalumba is of the forest, yet he is intricately connected to the history and legacies of the Spanish conquest, to the people of today and to the emergence, within history and destiny, of blackness as associated with self-liberation...
...9 Cimarr6n comes from the Spanish language of the Americas, with Arawak language roots.10 It emerged in the Caribbean and mainland South America around 1500, first to refer to wild cattle, and then, shortly thereafter, to refer to runaway indigenous and black slaves taking refuge in the haiti-the forested hilly regions of the large Caribbean islands and the interiors of Central and South America...
...Concepts of "race" came to reflect, by the sixteenth century, underlying postulates of West European mercantile dominance...
...A few examples are: The name "Seminole" derives from cimarrdn, a concept that underscores freedom...
...June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp...
...There is a story told by contemporary Carib-speaking Yekuana of Amazonian Venezuela...
...the Garlfuna (or "Black Carib") came into historical being on St...
...It is this hegemonic model that polarizes "blacks" and "Indians" in Latin America that we seek to contest...
...9. Stephanie C. Kane, The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), especially p. 107...
...Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), pp...
...They are our friends...
...Rather, blackness is fused with imageries of selfC Ii liberation...
...131-132...
...5 In the long succession of Latin American colonial, republican, and nation-state ideologies, this system of ethnic polarities has been mediated by this hegemonic hybridization-mestizaje--even to the point of bringing into being a so-called "cosmic race" through the biological and cultural transformation of negros into mulattos and indios into mestizos...
...Each portrayal of a black person enacts a representation of negro or zambo from the coastal provinces of Manabf or Esmeraldas...
...134, 135...
...They are affirmative social constructions that deny an identity rooted in slavery...
...6. Jos6 Vasconcelos and A.L...
...In Esmeraldas, western Ecuador-which is part of the Pacific lowlands of Panama, Colombia and Ecuador-the internationally known black author, Nelson Estupifidn Bass, offers us a powerful statement of identity...
...3 One wonders why in 2001 Western vocabularies have so few terms for diverse native peoples...
...The polar meanings of blackness in much indigenous mythology--of oppressed slaves and strong soldiers--emerge in two different Salasacan festivals: the soldier image of the festival of Caporales, celebrated in February, and the slave into self-liberation imagery of pre-lenten Carnival...
...8 This tale telling by the indigenous Carib-speaking Yekuana resonates well with stories of the only black people to have emerged from this area in historic times...
...and in Norman E. Whitten, Jr, "Los Paradigmas Mentales de la Conquista y el Nacionalismo: La Formaci6n de los Conceptos de las 'Razas' y las Transformaciones del Racismo," in Emma Cervone and Fredy Rivera, eds., Ecuador Racista: Imigenes e Identidades (Quito: FLACSO, 1999), pp...
...213-233...
...The protector role may extend into the afterlife, as well, as the negro soldiers from the festival of Caporales accompany the sponsors through or around purgatory, which is on the processional trail...
...Terminology in the Americas is fascinating as regards racialization, selfliberation, and the dynamics of indigenous and Afro-Latin American people...
...Identity refers to the ways in which a person, or an aggregate of people, achieve self-perception...
...Writing about racialized cultural diversity, Jean Muteba Rahier says, "There is no such thing as a world 'out there' that would exist independently of the discourses of representation...
...They were servants of the others...
...For literature on the Carib and Arawak people of the Caribbean see Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992...
...Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 2nd ed...
...He may come forth in beginning times and places, times of revolution of Eloy Alfaro, times of the grandparents, or present times...
...The Fafiuru made them work...
...And, while negros abounded, as slave and as free, they existed in a liminal social state-a position "betwixt and between" the established republics of Spanish and Indian...
...45-70...
...The historical experiences include recent economic transformations such as the 19 7 0s oil boom that sparked a migration of coastal AfroEcuadorians through the Andes to the Amazonian regions...
...Richard Price and Sally Price, "Collective Fictions: Performance in Saramaka Folktales," in Dorothea Scott Whitten and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds., Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1993), page 283...
...1 9 Nor do indigenous people, in their own languages, identify as "indios...
...Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 1996 (No...
...His imagery is of the forest-spiritual, dangerous and libidinous-but he resides near indigenous settlements...
...Their father was a black man, named Mekuru...
...The answer is found in the enduring hegemony of the West in which the great differences among the original people of the Americas remain muted or negated...
...Blackness emerges in the Canelos Quichua imagery of Amazonian Ecuador in stories of the Wayalumba Supai...
...Living human beings decide who and what is "black" and who and what belongs to a "group...
...What could we learn if we looked closely at the indigenous festivals, figures of speech, myths, stories and shamanic texts in places where blackness came to be a prominent feature in ethnic life...
...The West European concept of "race" in English, raza in Spanish, emerged around 1500 from what the Oxford English Dictionary calls "obscure roots...
...84-87...
...like black...
...Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Ambricas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979...
...lackness is a social construction, a set of images built up-in Europe and the Americas--of historically transmitted symbols that recognize and represent people of African descent from the 1450s to the present...
...In Oruro, Bolivia, during Carnival, indigenous actors represent blackness through the Morenada (from moreno, a dark, or black person), a performance that preserves the memory of African slaves brought to work in the mines of the highlands...
...Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 135...
...1 5 People so represented, in specific contexts, are signaled as contrasting with people who are recognized and represented differently...
...34-35...
...Many Salasacan people share a consciousness of the common struggle of AfroEcuadorian and indigenous people against white and mestizo oppression...
...Also see David M. Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 59...
...While blackness had no formal construct other than in the laws of slavery or the realities of self-liberated communities, the quality of being black, whether free or slave, became fused to the socially constructed qualities of whiteness and "Indianness...
...For an understanding of cultural imagery consult Dorothea Scott Whitten and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds., Imageryand Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas...
...Eventually, the concept cimarr6n became attached almost exclusively to runaway black people...
...21-63...
...The negros, dressed in soldiers' uniforms and carrying swords, dance with the dofias while moving their swords up and down in their scabbards...
...Other images of blackness in Ecuadorian Andean festivity include the Black Kings or Magi coming from "Abyssinia" to view the Christ child and to guard his treasures...
...He is the author of many books and articles about Afro-Latin American and Indigenous people of South America...
...This glossing of the diverse people of a continent by a single color term-negro--coincided, perhaps ironically, with the beginning of large-scale conversions of Africans to Christianity in the region of the Congo and by the emergence of "racially mixed" people in the coastal towns of West Africa...
...Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 6
