Private Lives, Public Histories brings together diverse methods from archaeology and cultural anthropology, enabling us to glean rare information on private lives from the historical record. The chapters span geographic areas to present recent ethnohistorical research that advances our knowledge of the connections between the public and private domains and the significance of these connections for understanding the past as a lived experience, both historically and in a contemporary sense. We discuss how the use of different sources-e.g., public records, personal journals, material culture, the built environment, letters, public performances, etc.-can reveal different types of information about past cultural contexts, as well as private sentiments about official culture and society. Through an exploration of sites as varied as homes, factories, plantations, markets, and tourism attractions we address the public significance of private sentiments, the resilience of bodies, and gendered interactions in historical contexts. In doing so, this book highlights linkages between private lives and public settings that have allowed people to continue to exist within, adapt to, and/or resist dominant cultural narratives.

This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

Private Lives, Public Histories brings together diverse methods from archaeology and cultural anthropology, enabling us to glean rare information on private lives from the historical record. The chapters span geographic areas to present recent ethnohistorical research that advances our knowledge of the connections between the public and private domains and the significance of these connections for understanding the past as a lived experience, both historically and in a contemporary sense. We discuss how the use of different sources-e.g., public records, personal journals, material culture, the built environment, letters, public performances, etc.-can reveal different types of information about past cultural contexts, as well as private sentiments about official culture and society. Through an exploration of sites as varied as homes, factories, plantations, markets, and tourism attractions we address the public significance of private sentiments, the resilience of bodies, and gendered interactions in historical contexts. In doing so, this book highlights linkages between private lives and public settings that have allowed people to continue to exist within, adapt to, and/or resist dominant cultural narratives.

Global Circuits of Blackness is a sophisticated analysis of the interlocking diasporic connections between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A diverse and gifted group of scholars delve into the contradictions of diasporic identity by examining at close range the encounters of different forms of blackness converging on the global scene. Contributors examine the many ways blacks have been misrecognized in a variety of contexts. They also explore how, as a direct result of transnational networking and processes of friction, blacks have deployed diasporic consciousness to interpellate forms of white supremacy that have naturalized black inferiority, inhumanity, and abjection. Various essays document the antagonism between African Americans and Africans regarding heritage tourism in West Africa, discuss the interaction between different forms of blackness in Toronto's Caribana Festival, probe the impact of the Civil Rights movement in America on diasporic communities elsewhere, and assess the anxiety about HIV and AIDS within black communities. The volume demonstrates that diaspora is a floating revelation of black consciousness that brings together, in a single space, dimensions of difference in forms and content of representations, practices, and meanings of blackness. Diaspora imposes considerable flexibility in what would otherwise be place-bound fixities. Contributors are Marlon M. Bailey, Jung Ran Forte, Reena N. Goldthree, Percy C. Hintzen, Lyndon Phillip, Andrea Queeley, Jean Muteba Rahier, Stephane Robolin, and Felipe Smith.

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.