Negotiating Spaces: Black Identity, Culture and Politics in South America

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Presenters

Lolita Brockington, Ph.D.
Lolita Gutierrez Brockington received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History and Latin American History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While her earlier work looked at the African presence in colonial southern Mexico, her more recent scholarship focuses on the African diaspora in the lesser known eastern Andean regions of South America. She is currently working on an extensive demographic project in the same area. She is a Fellow with the IAAR.

Tanya Golash-Boza
Tanya Golash-Boza is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her doctoral dissertation is titled The Manifold Meanings of Blackness among African-Descended Peruvians, and is based on ethnographic research with an Afro-Peruvian community. Her dissertation involves a discussion of racial identity, collective memory, and social whitening among Peruvians of African descent. Golash-Boza has also conducted research on the Latino/a community in the United States, and has published an article on the advantages of bilingualism for immigrants in the US. Golash-Boza has accepted a joint faculty position in the Departments of Sociology and American Studies at the University of Kansas, and will join the KU faculty in August 2005.

Ollie Johnson, Ph.D.
Ollie Johnson is currently an Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Wayne State University. He received his B.A. in Afro-American Studies and International Relations and a M.A. in Brazilian Studies from Brown University. He later earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, Brazilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964, was published in 2001. He co-edited Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era in 2002. Professor Johnson has conducted research on the Black Panther Party, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and other Black Political groups in the United States. He has also lectured on African American politics in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Japan. His current research focuses on Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin American Politics.

Robin Kirk
An independent journalist and writer, Kirk is a former Columbia researcher for Human Rights Watch in Washington, D.C. She is the author, most recently, of More Terrible than Death: Violence, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia and Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru. Currently, Kirk works as Coordinator of the Human Rights Initiative at Duke University.

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