Chapter 1, Sharika D. Crawford’s “Politics of Belonging on a Caribbean Borderland: The Colombian Islands of San Andrés and Providencia” calls attention to the difficulties that political elites encountered when trying to integrate borderlands regions into the Colombian nation-state. She sheds light on the agency that subaltern ethnic or racial groups had in the process of interpreting and negotiating their place in a nation-state that sought to eliminate or suppress their identity and culture. Crawford shows how the Afro-Caribbean inhabitants of these two islands resisted the attempts of Colombia’s officials in the early twentieth century to impose the Spanish language, Hispanic customs, and Catholicism upon them to create a common sense of national belonging. Rejecting such efforts of ethnic nationalism, the English-speaking and Protestant islanders called for a form of conditional and inclusive civic nationalism that tolerated their transcultural ethnic identities and accepted them as citizens who honored Colombia’s laws and its constitution. Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World, June 15, 2013
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 19:16:46 +0000
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