Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; "mestizaje" and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural "mestizaje"' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the "revolucion ciudadana" (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador.

This collection of essays explores the transformations of the political landscapes within which black social movements in Latin America have been operating since the end of the 1970s. Evaluating black social movements in their various national contexts, the essays reveal that these transformations have mostly consisted in the passage from state-sponsored ideological 'monocultural mestizaje' to state-managed multiculturalism and corporatism or co-optation. As the contributions to this volume show, black personalities and leaders of social movements were incorporated within the apparatus of the state. These new situations have rendered Afro-Latino political struggles more complex, at times even heightening the antagonism they encounter.

Drawing from a wide spectrum of disciplines, the essays in this collection examine in different national contexts the consequences of the "Latin American multicultural turn" in Afro Latino social movements of the past two decades.

This book examines, in Andean national contexts, the impacts of the 'Latin American multicultural turn' of the past two decades on Afro Andean cultural politics, emphasizing both transformations and continuities.

Drawing from a wide spectrum of disciplines, the essays in this collection examine in different national contexts the consequences of the "Latin American multicultural turn" in Afro Latino social movements of the past two decades.