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In 1993 Afro-Colombians were granted multicultural rights as members of a distinct ethnic group and as collective subjects of ‘black communities’. In recent years, this discourse has intersected with national and international apparatuses that seek to identify victims of Colombia’s war in order to grant them rights and reparations. This has resulted in the emergence of a new political subject that is both racialized and defined as a victim: the afro-desplazado, or black Internally Displaced Person (IDP). Using ethnographic description from an urban IDP arrival site in Bogota, I illustrate how these two discourses have become interwoven in practice and explore their consequences for afro-desplazados. I explore the political limits and possibilities of this new category by showing how Afro-Colombians both adopt it and push at its limits.

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’. My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens...

Este artículo traza una genealogía del concepto de negridad en América Latina mediante el análisis de la literatura histórica y antropológica que revela cómo han viajado en el tiempo y el espacio las ideas sobre la negridad. Comienzo en el periodo colonial para conceder la debida atención a las intensas luchas que se dieron por definir y desestabilizar la categoría del esclavo africano. Después, analizo diferentes encarnaciones de los nacionalismos latinoamericanos -blanqueamiento, mestizaje, y multiculturalismo- para mostrar cómo los proyectos de construcción de nación han configurado definiciones cambiantes de negridad. Finalmente, tomo distancia de los amarres nacionalistas para considerar las formas diaspóricas de negridad. Aunque sigo una especie de narrativa cronológica tengo en cuenta una diversidad de categorías -trabajo, raza, etnicidad, sexualidad y nación- que han influido, en mayor o menor medida, en las definiciones de la categoría de diferencia que refiero como negridad.