Contesting Mestizaje: Black Politics and Oral Traditions in Venezuela

Abstract

Afro‐descendant oral traditions are powerful modes of political expression that disrupt anti‐black logics within Latin America's mestizaje. Scholarship on Afro‐Latin American anti‐racist mobilisation centres on large‐scale, collective action. Instead, in this article, I examine songs and décimas, central forms of Afro‐descendant cultural subjectivity. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in La Guaira state, Venezuela, I show how oral traditions are place‐based forms of resistance against anti‐black racism. This research calls on scholars to attend to oral traditions and their geographies as a tool of anti‐racist political mobilisation.

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