Despite recent shifts towards perspectives that attempt to address indigeneity and blackness within a single frame, it is still not common to find texts that adopt this agenda in a continental sweep. Branche's collection helps cross the black/indigenous gulf with an accessible and engaging set of essays that will surely be widely used in courses on race and ethnicity in Latin America. Although most of the chapters, of which six focus on blackness and four on indigenousness, do not cross the traditional black/indigenous divide, and Branche's introductory chapter is the only one to engage with indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples and their relationships with each other, the book as a whole achieves an encompassing vision. Branche is a literature person, and this is reflected among the contributors: seven come from a literary background, while four are social scientists, although one of these, Kevin Santiago-Valles, analyses early twentieth-century Puerto Rican negrista poetry. The book manages to avoid an exclusively Iberian bias, including a chapter on Haiti and one on intellectuals from Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The overarching theoretical perspective is postcolonialist and decolonialist, and the book works as a useful introduction to these approaches for a student audience. Handelsman's account of an Afro-Ecuadorean journalist is preceded by a clear description of decolonial perspectives, drawn from the work of Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh and Juan García. Murdoch's chapter on the ideas of créolité developed by writers such as Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau offers an accessible inroad to postcolonial thinking. Many of the chapters focus on resistance and counterdiscourses, whether based on affirmations of indigeneity, blackness or mixedness, although mixedness as a contestatory identity, or mestizaje from below, appears mainly in the context of the Afro-inflected identities that Murdoch examines for the French Caribbean and that Prescott describes in the work of the late, much-lamented Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella.

Some of the chapters function as useful and incisive overviews of particular countries: Carolle Charles' piece on racial politics in Haiti under Duvalier, for instance, or Gislene Aparecida dos Santos' contribution on racism in Brazil (this has some interesting material on high school students' views on racial quotas for university admissions, showing how individuals may hold very contradictory attitudes). Gustavo Verdesio's chapter gives an overview of the fate of indigenous people in Uruguay over some 200 years, tracing the Charrua ethnic revival movement before launching into a Deleuzian interpretation of the trans-border Mbaya-Guarani people as a ‘war machine’ whose ‘nomadism’ challenges but also reaffirms the nation-state.

Other chapters home in on specific topics. Santiago-Valles gives a compelling account of negrista poetry and its familiar populist tactics of appropriation of stereotyped and primitivist images of blackness. Marcia Stephenson focuses on Aymara intellectuals in Bolivia who self-consciously adopted a rebellious and defiant ‘savage’ position from which to read and write, challenging and decolonising dominant images of the nation. One tactic was to unearth colonial land titles that could be used against the Bolivian state in indigenous land claims (just as the Bolivian state was using such documents in its claims against Paraguay in the 1930s Chaco War). Handelsman argues that Afro-Ecuadorean intellectuals' focus on affirming difference is a form of strategic essentialism that is nevertheless ‘intercultural’ in that it avoids setting up boundaries and is open to exchanges with, for example, indigenous movements. One could argue the same for Colombia, where black–indigenous alliances have also proved useful and black movements have emphasised cultural distinctiveness. Recently, however, this has been tempered by a realisation that such an emphasis can lead away from a head-on engagement with racism, particularly in urban environments.

Especially good is Denise Arnold's analysis of multiculturalism in Bolivia. Using detailed evidence of state policies in action, particularly with respect to mapping, counting and structures of administrative autonomy, she argues that the post-1994 multiculturalist regime was in fact assimilationist and inclusive only of the indio permitido. With the election of Evo Morales and the establishment of a Constituent Assembly, more radical proposals for indigenous autonomy are on the table, and Arnold looks in detail at a number of suggested variants of dualist structures of governance that attempt to incorporate this. Her chapter is useful both for its up-to-date analysis and for the focus on concrete mechanisms of governance.

The outstanding chapter for me is José Rabasa's analysis of how indigenous representations – maps feature here, as do murals and photographs – can participate in both dominant, colonial language and concepts, and native ones. This leads neither to hybridity (a novel fusion) nor double consciousness (an alienated internal conflict). There is coexistence without contradiction, an idea that reminded me of Roger Bastide's principe de coupure or principle of compartmentalisation, which he argued allowed Afro-Brazilians to participate in ‘modern’ Brazilian society and ‘traditional’ African religions with no sense of contradiction. Rabasa does not assume absence of conflict or opposition, however. On the contrary, a radical subalternity is maintained because apparently ‘modern’ forms have been appropriated and resignified. Most of all, Rabasa has an excellent critique of the teleologies of modernity, which he says inevitably cast indigenous peoples – and indeed ‘peripheral’ regions in general – as backward, secondary, marginal and perpetually awaiting modernisation. The refusal to see indigenous forms as pre-modern means that the coexistence of indigenous and dominant representations implies the coexistence of different logics or ontologies (although Rabasa does not use the word) that ‘remain discreet though never pure in a plural-dwelling world’ (p. 126). The fact that ‘there are subalterns who do not find a contradiction between desiring, acquiring and mastering modern life forms and continuing to practice forms of life that have nothing to do with modernity’ (p. 133) constitutes a radical form of alterity. Rabasa's idea that subalterns do not have a DuBoisean double consciousness may be overly optimistic, but it does open up fresh possibilities for avoiding the insidious colonialism of modernity as a concept and a frame for thinking that tends, for example, to recast ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ as instances of modernity and tradition.