In 1995 Darién Davis edited a collection of articles entitled Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean (Scholarly Resources, Inc.). The present work with its similar title picks up on many of the themes of its predecessor, shifting focus slightly in response to the many works on Afro-Latin American topics that have appeared over the past decade. Unlike the earlier book, these articles, except in one case, have not been previously published. According to his introduction, Davis' aim is to reveal the different ways that African peoples have had an impact on Latin America from 1800 to the present day. The emphasis, as his sub-title indicates, is on their ‘multifaceted legacies’, a testament, he writes, ‘to their ingenuity and creativity in a world in which their freedoms were severely restricted’ (p. 2). The contributors have interpreted legacy in a variety of ways, producing a collection that is interesting and informative, but lacking in coherence and, ultimately, confusing about what that legacy has been.

The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with the independence and early national periods when slavery was still in full flight in most of the region and which, consequently, seems somewhat at odds with the book's title. David Geggus examines the impact on Latin America of what is often cited as the most important event with regard to the slave struggle in the Americas, the Haitian revolution. But after considering such things as resistance, race relations and abolition, he concludes that ‘its influence was often ambiguous; its repercussions, contradictory’ (p. 32). On the other hand, Camilla Townsend's study of slaves in Ecuador between independence and abolition finds plenty of evidence of black resistance in the efforts of slaves to secure their freedom. One recurring device that appeared in the first decades of the period was the slaves' use of the metaphor of independence to justify their claim for personal liberty. In the process, she argues, slaves played a central role in the movement toward abolition. It is a conclusion shared by Eduardo Silva who looks at the role of a Rio de Janeiro quilombo, or runaway community, in the Brazilian abolitionist movement. In time and theme, Silva's chapter seems to fit into this first section, but for some reason has been placed in the second. In the case of early republican Argentina, slaves were active as well, but Ricardo Salvatore suggests that the Afro-Argentines almost disappeared after abolition, in large part because of the negative view that developed around them because of their earlier ties with the Buenos Aires governor Juan Manuel de Rosas and the benefits they enjoyed at that time. As a result, their importance in forming Argentina remained unrecognised. In Honduras a similar disappearing act was evident, according to Dario Euraque. Here, the black population was split between local blacks with roots in the colonial period and recently arrived Black Caribs. The former came to deny their African ancestry as they were absorbed by the process of racial mixing during the twentieth century when Honduras tried to define itself as a homogenous mestizo nation.

The second section is entitled rather vaguely ‘Dialogues and Challenges to Full Citizenship’. In addition to the Silva contribution, it includes a chapter by Aline Helg on Afro-Cubans in post-independence Cuba that is extracted from her award-winning book. She focuses on the Cuban myth of racial equality as seen in the failure of the black population to establish a position of influence in the newly independent country, the establishment of the Partido Independiente de Color to try to secure that racial equality, and its brutal repression in 1912. Once again one wonders what this tells us about the African legacy. The book gets back on track when the editor and Judith Michelle Williams describe the attempts at celebrating blackness that took place in the francophone Caribbean, Cuba and Brazil from 1930 to the 1950s in response to Marcus Garvey's call for pan-Africanism and the francophone movement known as ‘Negritude’. The evidence comes from an examination of some of the important but largely unrecognised cultural developments of the time.

The third section, entitled ‘Displacement, Transnationalism, and Globalization’, introduces developments from more recent decades. Black suffering is once again evident in Aviva Chomsky's study of Afro-Colombians who have been displaced by the decades of internal warfare and the accompanying land grab by multinational corporations to expand commercial holdings and mining operations. But as she shows, not all of the peasants affected have been Afro-Colombians, so that this is not just a racial issue. The final two chapters examine some of the diasporic elements of the African legacy that tie Afro-Latin Americans to the United States. Sujatha Fernandes and Jason Stanyek discuss hip-hop to see whether the pattern of urban dissonance that is central to the music's development in the United States has also been evident in Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil. They find elements of protest in all three countries, with the groups incorporating aspects of their particular realities to create distinctive branches of hip-hop. Bobby Vaughn and Ben Vinson III reverse the diasporic element to examine the impact of Afro-Mexican migrants in North Carolina. One of the most interesting points in this chapter was the failure of Afro-Americans in the state to recognise the newcomers as black. The book concludes with a short overview by the editor of Latin American films dealing with black issues and showcasing black actors.

The various articles show that the black experience has been extensive and now is reaching farther afield as a result of migration and globalisation. But the picture of suffering, abuse, discrimination and even resistance that emerges from many of these pages indicate that this is more about the legacy of slavery than that of Africans. Tightening the focus – and applying a more rigorous editing at various levels – would have made this a more useful teaching tool.