Title: Afro-Latin America
Year: 2019
Issue: 127
Cover image: Joiri Minaya, After Grau Araujo, 2015. From the Dominican Women–Google Search postcard series. Archival print of a digital collage. Image courtesy of the artist.
El primer número trilingüe de Transition, Afro-Latin America, presenta una gama de voces que demuestran la diversidad de la experiencia negra en América Latina. Teniendo a Laura Correa Ochoa como editora invitada, este volumen presenta el trabajo de la activista Mijane Jiménez Salinas, la académica Doris Sommer, el escritor Quince Duncan y una traducción que la poeta y académica Em Rose hace de la obra de Juan Pablo Sojo.
Transition’s first trilingual issue, Afro-Latin America, features a range of voices testifying to the diversity of black experience across Latin America. Guest edited by Laura Correa Ochoa, this volume features work by Alvaro Roberto Pires, who chronicles the work of religious leader Pai-Euclides, who deepened the understanding of Afro-Brazilian religions like candomble, Antonia Araujo documents how Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban women use boxing to fight marginalization , Afro-Mexican activist Mijane Jimènez Salinas addresses the obstacles to claiming ethnic rights in a country that imagines itself indigenous and mestizo, scholar Doris Sommer confronts the challenge of translating blackness in the former British colony San Andres–with fiction by Quince Duncan and a translation of Afro-Venezuelan writer Juan Pablo Sojo by poet and scholar, Em Rose.
“Many U.S. observers in the early twentieth century interpreted the apparent lack of segregation and general acceptance of racial mixture as a sign that racial discrimination presented less of a challenge to Latin Americans of African descent than those in the United States,” writes Laura Correa Ochoa, in her introduction. This “had the effect of obscuring the particularities of racial hierarchies and the histories of Afro-Latin struggles for inclusion…the writers and artists in this issue invite us to reconsider these narratives.”