THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF AFRO-LATIN AMERICA
AND THE CARIBBEAN: Diasporic Dimensions

Kevin A. Yelvington

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.227


Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620-8100;
e-mail: yelvingt@chuma1.cas.usf.edu

Key Words African diaspora, blackness, history of anthropology, “race,”
ethnicity, nationalism, creolization

■ Abstract 

The contributions of a number of First and Third World scholars to
the development of the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and
the Caribbean have been elided from the core of the discipline as practiced in North
America and Europe. As such, the anthropology of the African diaspora in the
Americas can be traced to the paradigmatic debate on the origins of New World black
cultures between Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African
American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The former argued for the existence of
African cultural continuities, the latter for New World culture creations in the context of
discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African
descent, in light of slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial contexts. As a result, subsequent positions have been defined by oppositions in every subdisciplinary specialization and area of interest. Creolization models try to obviate this bifurcation, and newer
dialogical theoretical perspectives build upon such models by attempting to combine
revisionist historiography with social/cultural constructionist approaches to identity,
especially around the concept of blackness understood in the context of cultural identity
politics