Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
'Black indigeneity' constitutes the conceptual paradox at the heart of anthropologist Mark Anderson's critical and illuminating examination of a prevalent if problematic view traceable to the very inception of the European adventure in the Americas. The imputed mutual exclusivity between black and indigenous categories of cultural identity is a dichotomy powerfully inscribed in both popular and scholarly conception. In this simplistic formulation, indigenous identity connotes purity of pedigree, historical rootedness, and cultural authenticity, while black identity signifies race blending, displacement and spuriousness of culture. However, as Anderson demonstrates, social reality is never so neatly parsed, and this has profound implications for our comprehension of identity politics, ethnic mobilisation and development policy. This is most compellingly so in the quotidian human experience and prevailing life chances of those with the most at stake, the putative beneficiaries.
Anderson engages this tangle in a nuanced analysis of the more recent cultural trajectory of the Garifuna, an African-Amerindian people native to Central America's Atlantic coast since being deported en masse from the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent by English imperial forces in 1797. Anderson unpacks the notional opposition between blackness and indigeneity in an ethnographically textured account of Garifuna activism from the 1920s onward, with particular attention to intertwined yet distinctive and often competing views of Garifuna identity, as embodied in the civil and human rights activism of two high-profile ethnic organisations in Honduras, the Organización de Desarrollo Étnico Communitario (Ethnic Community Development Organisation, ODECO) and the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (Fraternal Black Organisation of Honduras, OFRANEH). The author sets his assessment in the context of post-Second World War Garifuna migration to the United States and in an analysis of Garifuna conceptions and performances of transnational black identity via participation, especially by youth,...