The Making of a Field: Afro-Latin American Studies

Abstract

This volume seeks to introduce readers to the dynamic and growing field of Afro-Latin American studies.We define that field, first, as the study of people of African ancestry in Latin America, and second, as the study of the larger societies in which those people live.Under the first heading, scholars study Black histories, cultures, strategies, and struggles in the region.Under the second, they study blackness, and race more generally, as a category of difference, as an engine of stratification and inequality, and as a key variable in processes of national formation.There are sound historical reasons for both approaches.Of the 10.7 million enslaved Africans who arrived in the New World between 1500 and 1870, almost two-thirds came to colonies controlled by Spain or Portugal (Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat 2015, 440; see also Chapter 2).It was in those territories that slavery lasted for the longest periods of time in the Western Hemisphere, spanning over 350 years.Africans began arriving at the islands of the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century, and slavery was not finally abolished in those islands until 1886, when the last slaves were emancipated in Cuba.Two years later, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery; today it is home to the second-largest Afrodescendant population in the world, exceeded in size only by Nigeria.Close to a million Africans arrived in Cuba during the nineteenth century and over two million in Brazil, a process that helps explain the profound influence that African-based cultural practices have exercised in the formation of national cultures in those two countries and around the region more generally.Yet it was not until quite recently that the scholarship on race, inequality, and racial stratification in Latin America had grown enough to 1