Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture
in Honduras (review)
Sarah England
The Americas, Volume 67, Number 2, October 2010, pp. 297-298 (Review)
Published by Cambridge University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.2010.0025
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/396187
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REVIEWS
297
AFRICANA, SLAVERY & DIASPORA STUDIES
Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras. By Mark
Anderson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 290. Notes.
Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $25.00 paper.
In scholarship on race in the Americas it has often been argued that, while there are several ethnic groups that could be classified as Afro-Indigenous, they have largely remained
invisible or have been forced to emphasize one aspect of their hyphenated identity over
the other as a result of the common perception that black and indigenous are mutually
exclusive ethno-racial categories. Indigeneity in the Americas has long had the connotation of tradition, racial purity, cultural stasis, rootedness, and authenticity, whereas blackness has had the connotation of acculturation, diaspora, and inauthenticity. In this book,
Mark Anderson demonstrates how this perception of mutual exclusivity has often been
used by scholars to make sense of Garifuna culture and identity and by state and transnational political actors to create policy related to Garifuna rights. He also shows that in
spite of this attempt to categorize Garifuna as either indigenous or black, Garifuna themselves have not completely given over to this binary model of ethno-racial identity but
have instead articulated and practiced both an activist and everyday identity politics that
he calls “black indigeneity.” This form of identity emphasizes African descent, a history
of being discriminated against as blacks in Honduras, and identification and membership
in the African diaspora, while also recognizing structural similarities with indigenous peoples who have suffered a long history of land encroachment, discrimination as a people
with a non-Hispanic language and culture, and economic exploitation as a folkloric
tourist attraction. While this hybrid identity has given Garifuna activists the ability to join
other members of the African diaspora in anti-racist struggles in one moment, and claim
rights to land, bilingual education, and so forth as an autochthonous peoples in another
moment, it has also come with certain tensions because these identities have different
political and cultural connotations that both open spaces and place limitations on
demands that Garifuna activists can make within current multicultural politics.
Anderson bases his ethnographic study in the Garifuna village of Sambo Creek, and supplements his analysis with intensive participation with the two main Garifuna national
level organizations, OFRANEH and ODECO, in order to show how the politics of black
indigenity works in everyday social interaction and among activists. He deftly shows how
black indigeneity does not arise out of the simple fact that Garifuna are Afro-Indigenous,
but rather as a response to a complex history of the way that Garifuna have been racialized and folklorized by the Honduran state, their experience with U. S. notions of blackness through their transnational migration to New York City, and through their negotiation of the local and the international politics of multiculturalism and ethnic rights. Like
most Central American nations, Honduras has a racial politics of indo-hispanic mestizaje.
Within this blacks have been seen as outside of the Spanish-indigenous racial continuum,
at best placing them outside of the national identity, at worst constructing them as racially
contaminating. By tracing the history of Garifuna activism from the 1920s to the present, Anderson shows how Garifuna have fought against this construction of blackness
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REVIEWS
through anti-racism campaigns, but have also distanced themselves from other blacks,
positioning themselves as blacks who were never slaves, and who have a more authentic
African culture. This notion of being autochthonous blacks places them squarely within
the current moment of multiculturalism in Honduras in which ethnic groups have
increasingly gained space to demand rights as a “people.” Anderson shows that while
both OFRANEH and ODECO have taken advantage of this space to push for Garifuna
rights, and both use the notion of black indigeneity, OFRANEH takes a more critical
stance on neoliberal politics and how it promotes structural racism, while ODECO has
placed more emphasis on fighting against ideological racism. He shows that while this is
a somewhat different emphasis, their goals for economic and cultural empowerment are
the same. He also demonstrates that in everyday articulations of identity, Garifuna negotiate between black indigeneity, which stresses Garifuna cultural roots, tradition, etc. and
an identification with U.S. blackness through the consumption of Nike, for example.
Though this may appear to be a simple mimicry of U.S. corporate constructions of blackness, he argues that we must also recognize that they are enacting it in the context of
Honduras where any kind of blackness is seen as counter-hegemonic to indo-hispanic
mestizaje and where black modernity challenges notions of Garifuna culture as backwards, primitive, and folkloric. So like blackness and indigeniety, traditional Garifuna
identity and modern blackness are not mutually exclusive, but are rather enacted and
emphasized in different moments by the same people.
Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this book adds a great deal of
insight into the literature on race, racial identities, and ethnic politics in the Americas.
Rather than engage in the tired exercise of trying to determine whether the Garifuna are
more indigenous or black, Anderson shows how they negotiate between these two identities according to the connotations and politics attached to them at both the local and
international level. This is not to prove their ethnic identity inauthentic or manipulative
but rather to highlight the tensions and creativity.
Soka University of America
Aliso Viejo, California
SARAH ENGLAND
Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations,
1808–1848. By Manuel Barcia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
Pp. xiv, 211. Map. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 cloth.
This book is part of a growing body of literature that explores the dynamics of slave resistance movements in Cuba. Unlike earlier monographs by Robert L. Paquette (1989) and
Matt D. Childs (2006), which focus on specific events such as the Escalera conspiracy and
Aponte’s rebellion, Manuel Barcia emphasizes the interdependence of several types of
resistance during the early nineteenth century. The work blends familiar aspects of slavery and slave life with novel material collected primarily from the Cuban National
Archives in Havana. Barcia devotes five core chapters to discussions of the various types
of slave resistance, including homicides, conspiracies and revolts, marronage, suicides,
legal challenges, and hidden forms of defiance. In essence, Barcia divides these forms of