Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_3275
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
x, 192 p. : ill., maps
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = vita)
Includes vita
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Fatimah E. Williams
Abstract (type = abstract)
This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of the lived experience of multicultural constitutional reform and juridical recognition among black populations in
Colombia. The Constitutional Reform of 1991 and subsequent Law 70 of 1993 – also called the Law of Black Communities – made Colombia one of the first countries in Latin America to recognize black people as a distinct cultural group and grant them rights to
collective territories, political representation, and cultural protections. However, my research reveals that Colombian blackness is enshrined in the new constitution as “black communities” (comunidades negras), an ethnic identity and political subjectivity limited to the rural Colombian Pacific region, subsistence practices, and cultural traditions.
Grounded in anthropological theory and methods, Black Bogotá compares collective and individual experiences of race in post-recognition Colombia among two distinct sets of black actors-- activists and capital city residents. Among black activists, I found that the law’s focus on ethnicity and culture neutralized urban antiracist activism as it bolstered rural, grassroots movements that could couch their claims in cultural difference, ethnic identity, and territory. These rural movements found greater traction within legal discourses on blackness, and later among transnational activist communities when they mobilized around the state’s failure to protect their legal rights. Meanwhile, my interviews and participant observation with black residents of Bogotá reveal that they creatively conceptualize black identity, citizenship, and race from their positions as professionals, partners in interracial
relationships, internal migrants to the capital, and parents rearing black children in a predominately Euro-Andean city, with much resistance to grassroots movement and legal constructions of Colombian blackness and black social issues. This project explores blackness as a cultural and a legal phenomenon, showing how race operates in daily
social life outside of sites of predominately black populations, at the margins of state politics and law, and in conjunction with global discourses of rights and black identity. This research contributes to Latin American scholarship on race, ethnographic studies of
transnational activism, and recent anthropological debates on the extent to which law can address social difference and inequality.
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.