‘Black indigeneity’ constitutes the conceptual paradox at the heart of anthropologist Mark Anderson's critical and illuminating examination of a prevalent if problematic view traceable to the very inception of the European adventure in the Americas. The imputed mutual exclusivity between black and indigenous categories of cultural identity is a dichotomy powerfully inscribed in both popular and scholarly conception. In this simplistic formulation, indigenous identity connotes purity of pedigree, historical rootedness, and cultural authenticity, while black identity signifies race blending, displacement and spuriousness of culture. However, as Anderson demonstrates, social reality is never so neatly parsed, and this has profound implications for our comprehension of identity politics, ethnic mobilisation and development policy. This is most compellingly so in the quotidian human experience and prevailing life chances of those with the most at stake, the putative beneficiaries.
Anderson engages this tangle in a nuanced analysis of the more recent cultural trajectory of the Garifuna, an African-Amerindian people native to Central America's Atlantic coast since being deported en masse from the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent by English imperial forces in 1797. Anderson unpacks the notional opposition between blackness and indigeneity in an ethnographically textured account of Garifuna activism from the 1920s onward, with particular attention to intertwined yet distinctive and often competing views of Garifuna identity, as embodied in the civil and human rights activism of two high-profile ethnic organisations in Honduras, the Organización de Desarrollo Étnico Communitario (Ethnic Community Development Organisation, ODECO) and the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (Fraternal Black Organisation of Honduras, OFRANEH). The author sets his assessment in the context of post-Second World War Garifuna migration to the United States and in an analysis of Garifuna conceptions and performances of transnational black identity via participation, especially by youth, in a global popular consumer culture closely identified with the African diaspora.
Garifuna struggles to secure recognition, rights and rewards vis-à-vis the Honduran national project resonate with ethnic mobilisations worldwide. ODECO and OFRANEH share in combating a history of racialisation, folklorisation, discrimination, economic marginalisation and, especially in the past two decades, often violent expropriation of community lands in the service of tourism development. That project has brought little benefit to the Garifuna, who have often in fact been dispossessed in the process. Beyond a familiar worldwide strategy of international migration pursued by so many, as black subjects who reside outside the received regional ideology of mestizaje or hybrid Indian-Hispanic identity, the Garifuna know the limits of securing participatory rights based on claims of purely indigenous identity. Unsurprisingly, given widespread embrace of the ideology and politics of multiculturalism, Garifuna activism has entailed a flexibly strategic blend of elements of blackness and indigeneity, varying historically according to socio-economic and political context.
ODECO has concentrated more on calling out and combating racist discrimination in the realm of everyday cultural, social and political life, while OFRANEH has implicated the neoliberal turn in Latin America in perpetuating the structural conditions that inform and enforce racist ideology in daily practice. ‘Black indigeneity’ thus entails pointed awareness of historical racial discrimination tied to African descent, while also enabling the Garifuna – as a people never enslaved – to distance themselves from other blacks, identifying instead with the heroic struggles of indigenous Amerindian peoples against essentialisation, the sequestered, aestheticised cultural curiosities of marginal importance to the national project. Anderson's is a thorough, fascinating, theoretically astute and culturally informed assessment of the manifest tensions and dynamic contradictions inherent in Garifuna efforts to fashion individual and collective identities, continuously reshaping themselves in a post-postmodern world. A corrective to ‘either-or’ ideologies of racial, ethnic and cultural difference that condition and confound much of popular, scholarly and policy discourse, Anderson's work counters a brand of literature whose deference to a precious strain of cultural theory has neither enhanced our understanding of the world nor helped to change it.
Yet one is compelled to push back against Anderson's rather categorical assertion of the limited value of contemporary ethnography of older historical accounts: ‘Scholars, in fact, know little about the [past] conditions under which the “mixture” of diverse peoples occurred, and, even if we did, it would tell us little about how the Garifuna conceptualize, annunciate, and perform a sense of identity via categories such as “Black,” “indigenous,” or “Indian” in the present’ (p. 4). Certainly, present-day ethnography holds a patent advantage over the testimony of yellowing documents whose very genesis was complicit in the imperial project. The past, privileged world view of powerful outsiders could not be more at odds with the attentiveness and empathy of today's trained participant-observer, but as a manifestation of evolving human consciousness and self-awareness, the ethnic categories of today are the undeniable product of a vexed and contentious history rooted in the oscillating inequities of power.
What such documents can offer is additional texture, complexity and generational depth to present testimonies of the historical inheritors of centuries of unequal engagement in the brutal elaboration of the New World political economy. Consider that documents from Sevilla's Archivo General de Indias on the earliest, most tenuous days of the Garifuna in Honduras quote the defiant words and convey the militant stance of their leaders, who rejected outright the Audiencia de Guatemala's 1797 overture to recruit the new arrivals to Spain's struggle against Great Britain for control of the Western Caribbean. What are we to make of Manhattan records of the 1820s founding of the first African American theatre company in the United States by a St. Vincent native whose premiere piece re-inscribed in Garifuna terms the struggle that ended in their defeat and deportation by British forces? How shall we interpret Thomas Young's 1847 Narrative of a Residence on the Mosquito Shore, which offers copious evidence of Garifuna strategies to position themselves – in the ethnically complex, nominally British Caribbean lowlands of Central America – as a distinctive people with studied consumer tastes, partaking of the best imported trade goods to be had from itinerant English traders? What of 1920s accounts from the Jesuit provincial archives in St. Louis, wherein Garifuna merchant seamen returned home with substantial inventories of US consumer products, including pump organs made by an eminent New Hampshire manufacturer whose creations more commonly graced the living rooms of well-to-do US households of the time? And in recent decades, what might it signify that popular Garifuna music, deeply rooted in local spirituality, has won planetary audition on the so-called ‘world music’ stage that caters to the self-consciously eclectic tastes of global elites?
Matters such as these speak to the tensions, displacements, dialogical character and resolute metropolitan engagement of a cultural history that is in fact productive of one of the world's first truly ‘modern’ peoples. Far from manifesting the dead hand of history, such accounts vivify the longue durée of a people whose transnational, pluricultural mode of existence springs from the very advent of modernity itself, a people who continue to draw creatively upon a dynamic reserve of cultural expressivity that remains somehow uniquely, recognisably Garifuna, whatever else the mutable personal testimonies, external trappings, competing ideological formulations and structural-material circumstances may appear to indicate.
