African Americans and National Identities in Central AmericaPosted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Social Science on 2010-02-10 21:41Z by Steven |
African Americans and National Identities in Central America
Rina Cáceres, Professor of Diaspora Studies Program at the Centro de Investigationes Historicas de America Central
Universidad de Costa Rica
Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke University
Mauricio Meléndez
An interdisciplinary, multinational research program to reconceptualize and document, both visually and textually, the history of people of African descent in Central America.
Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program, Mount Holyoke College and The Center for Central American Historical Research at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Our collaborative research project seeks to reassess the historical presence and contributions of peoples of African descent to the national histories and identities constructed in Central America over the past two centuries. In choosing a color for the cosmic race, modern nationalist thinkers in the region systematically emphasized the European and Indigenous origins of its peoples, in terms of both historical fact and group agency. Thus they radically discounted not only the importance, role, and presence of any African heritage but also as the centrality of racial or ethnic conflict within the historical experience of non-indigenous sectors of society…
Visit the project website here.