Coming up: Spring 2008 CONFERENCE

Global Movements, Local Identities:
Race, Space, and the African Diaspora in Latin America

March 6-7, 2008
University of California Los Angeles

Organized by the UC Berkeley Afro-Latino Working Group and the UCLA Center for Race and Democracy in the Americas

Schedule · Call for Papers · Conference Registration and Travel

Sponsored by the Inter-American Foundation

Spring 2007 Conference Report Coming Soon
Beyond Visibility:
Rethinking the African Diaspora in Latin America

The mission of the Afro-Latino Working Group is to advance inter-disciplinary scholarship on race and the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The literature on this topic is limited and the overwhelming majority of it focuses on Brazil. We seek to bring theoretical and analytical complexity to the white/indigenous binary that has characterized scholarship on race, ethnicity and culture in Latin America.

Our meetings are aimed at advancing scholarship and discourse on the African Diaspora in Latin America through: reading and discussing new research on the topic; creating a community of graduate students and faculty researching Afro-Latino issues; and providing the space for working group members as well as faculty, both from Berkeley and elsewhere, to present their work.

At each meeting, a group member or invited guest will give a presentation either on the designated reading for the meeting, or on their own research. The majority of the meeting will be focused on discussing issues related to the reading/presentation. Members will receive the readings before the meeting in order to have an informed and directed discussion.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a community of graduate students and faculty researching this topic in order to bring greater visibility to the realities of people of African descent in Latin America. In addition to our monthly meetings, we hope to hold one public meeting a semester which will be posted on our Web page. We welcome undergraduates, graduate students and faculty interested in Afro-Latino issues to these meetings.

For more information on how to get involved in the Afro-Latino Working Group, please contact:

Vielka Hoy (vielkahoy@calmail.berkeley.edu)
Tianna Paschel (tpaschel@calmail.berkeley.edu)

Schedule

All meetings will be held in the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) conference room at 2334 Bowditch Street in Berkeley from 4-5:30 p.m.

September 26 Steven Gregory: Transnational Processes and Globalization in the Dominican Republic
Presented by Petra Raquel Rivera, African Diaspora Studies and Juan Herrera, Comparative Ethnic Studies

October 3 Nancy Appelbaum: Race and Regionalism
Appelbaum, Nancy. 2005. Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia , 1846-1948. Introduction and Conclusion
Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (eds). 2005. Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Introduction: Racial Nations
Presented by Tianna S. Paschel, Sociology

October 10 George Priestley: Racialization Processes for Afro-Latinos of West Indian Descent
Readings TBD
Presented by Vielka Cecilia Hoy, African Diaspora Studies

October 17 -Paper presentation: Race, Place and Afro-Cuban folkloric Musical Practices
Rebecca Bodenheimer, Ph.D. Candidate, Ethnomusicology

October 24 Michael Hanchard: Racial Hegemony and Democracy in Brazil
"Black Cinderella: Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil" in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, edited by Michael Hanchard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Presented by Celso Castilho, History

October 31 Robin Derby: Race and National Identity in the Dominican Republic
Readings TBD
Presented by Ryan Rideau, African Diaspora Studies

November 7 Augustin Lao-Montes: Post-Colonial Phenomenology and Afro-Latinos

Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies "Decolonial Moves: En-Gendering African Diasporas" Cultural Studies, forthcoming (2007).
Presented by Jennifer Jones, Sociology

*If you have any questions, contact afrolatinogroup [at] lists.berkeley.edu.

** Readings will be available electronically and will be sent to group members over email.

BACKGROUNDS OF PARTICIPANTS

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Ethnic Studies

Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2003) earned his B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico in 1994, and his Ph.D. (2002) in Religious Studies from Brown University. He specializes in phenomenology, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and modern religious thought. He is interested in theories of decolonization as they emerge in different contexts and from different subjective positions in the Americas. Dr. Maldonado has done a considerable amount of work on Africana, Jewish, and Latin American intellectual productions. He is currently working on a theory of epistemic and material decolonization based on Fanon's work and on the theoretical production of U.S. feminists of color. This work encompasses reflections on religion, philosophical anthropology, social and cultural formations in the Americas, and the role of critical intellectual activity in the context of global coloniality. Dr. Maldonado's publications include, among others, "La antropología filosófica de Emmanuel Lévinas" [Emmanuel Levinas's Philosophical Anthropology], Intersticios (Mexico) 5.10 (1999); "The Cry of the Self as a Call from the Other: The Paradoxical Loving Subjectivity of Frantz Fanon," Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture (Winter 2001); and "Postimperial Reflections on Crisis, Knowledge, and Utopia: Transgresstopic Critical Hermeneutics and the 'Death of European Man.'" Review 25.3 (2002)

Members

Rebecca Bodenheimer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music, Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation research, for which she recently completed 9 months of fieldwork in Cuba, focuses on Afro-Cuban folkloric musical practices and the politics of place. She is also interested in North American hip hop and other popular musical practices within the African diaspora.

Celso Castilho is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. His teaching and research interests center on the histories of slavery, popular politics, and race throughout the Americas, but he has written mostly on Brazil. He is completing a dissertation on abolitionism in northeastern Brazil, utilizing the case study of Pernambuco as a lens to analyze the dynamics of the abolitionist movement, as well as, the broader changes transpiring within Brazilian political culture in the late nineteenth century. He has also begun preliminary work for an article-length study on Maria Firmina dos Reis, a mulatto woman from the northern state of Maranhao who published URSULA in 1859, reputed to be Brazil's first abolitionist novel.

Juan Herrera is a third year Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies.

Vielka Cecilia Hoy is a third year doctoral student in African Diaspora Studies and co-founder of the Afro-Latino Working Group. Her research looks at racialization for Afro-Latinos in the United States, specifically Central Americans of West Indian descent. Vielka is also an education consultant for Oakland Unified School District, helping schools reduce their suspensions by training teachers to manage their classrooms in a different way. Vielka holds a MA from UCLA's Afro-American Studies program and a BS from New York University in Social Studies Education

Jennifer Jones is a PhD Candidate in the Berkeley Sociology Department. Her research areas are racial and ethnic inequality, racial formation, political sociology, Latin American and the Caribbean, theory and qualitative methods, with a focus on the relationship between racialization and the state. She has done research on the differentially racialized impacts policy in Cuba and recently completed research that examines the viability of categorical mixed race identity through mixed race organizations, for which she received her MA in Sociology in 2006. In addition to continuing her work on intraracial relations and mixed race identity, her future work will examine racialization in the migration process among Afro-Mexicans in the U.S.

Ryan Rideau is a third year doctoral student in the African Diaspora Studies Program. He received a B.A. in both English and Ethnic Studies from the University of California - Berkeley. He has studied in Cuba, and his work looks at articulations and discourses of blackness through hip-hop music and culture in Cuba.

Petra Rivera is a Ph.D. candidate in the African Diaspora Studies program at Berkeley. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2003 with a B.A. in African American Studies with a certificate in Latin American Studies. Petra also received an M.A. in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley in 2006. Ms. Rivera received a Tinker Grant from Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies in the summer of 2005 to research race and popular music in Puerto Rico. Her current research interests include theorizing race, Diaspora, popular culture, and national identity in the Spanish Caribbean, specifically Puerto Rico.

Tianna S. Paschel is a third year doctoral student in Sociology and the co-founder of the Afro-Latino Working Group. Previously, she worked as a Program Associate for the Race Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. She received her M.A. in Latin American Studies from UCLA where she focused on race relations and cultural commodification in Brazil and served as a graduate researcher for the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Tianna is interested in issues of development, race inequality, social movements, and national race ideology. She recently completed a summer fellowship at the Inter-American Foundation, an agency that grants funds to grassroots organizations in Latin America, and is on the board of directors of Levantamos: The Center for Afro-Brazilian – American Cooperation. Tianna is currently researching multiculturalism, constitutional reform, and Afro-Colombian social movements.