Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival [Paperback]

 

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas--Ecuador's province most associated with blackness--engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spacial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

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An important contribution to analyses of ritual and performance in terms of history, race, and gender. Rahier departs from the recent emphasis on transnationalism and makes a strong argument for the importance of studying the performance within specific local contexts.

--Rachel Corr, author ofRitual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes

"A captivating and informative study of the Roman Catholic Feast of the Three Kings as celebrated in two Ecuadorian towns. Rahier gathers extremely rich observations, described in minute detail and finely illustrated, and the book sheds new light on Ecuadorian race and gender relations with great flƒb