"We're trying to work in compliance with the principles of Durban," Judge [Graciela Dixon], the current president of Panama's Supreme Court, said. "There's an emphasis on establishing the precise policies our countries need to assure inclusion for African descendants in Latin America." Late last year, Congresswoman Campbell hosted some 75 delegates from 20 countries who came to Costa Rica to attend the third Conference of Afro-Descendant Legislators in the Americas and the Caribbean. "I don't come from the activist Afro tradition," [Edgard Ortuno Silva] confesses, "but from the militant tradition of change. I admit that what has happened to me is that I overcame the problems of Blacks in Uruguay, of people of my skin color. And most people who have overcome no longer have a consciousness of being Black. But in my case, the political process I have been a part of made me aware of the African activist movement and I have talked with them and they have made me conscious."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., Combines historical elements on the formation of Brazil in their ethnic identity and cultural character and shows the reader the contributions of Bantus in this process. Moreover, Nei Lopes sets new parameters on the relationship between Islam and negritude. By way of its involvement with the black cultural resistance in Brazil and Africa, presents the reader with a face of history unknown to most Brazilians.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p., Analyzes how imperial control met with resistance and how Africans, Indians, and Spaniards, and their descendants interacted with one another. Her study uncovers an intersection and cross-fertilization of sociocultural measurements identifiable in the workplace, courts, church, and private lives. Brockington innovatively uses Spanish colonial documentary sources, including serial financial accounts of wealthy orphans, court cases, parish records, and census information of hacienda workers to elucidate race, ethnic, class, and gender issues within the colonial reality of contradiction and ambiguity.
The Caribbean branch of the Toronto-based Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) this week welcomed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments on the horrors of slavery, saying he has done much more for the cause than "our own" Black-led governments in the region on the issue. Maxie Fox, a spokesman for the GAC formed in Barbados in 2002, said the GAC and other Afro organizations have been trying for years to persuade regional governments to "have a discourse" on slavery, its effects on Blacks and even reparations, but only Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo, a Hindu, has seen it fit to acknowledge correspondence.
Nego Gato's current production, under the series "Brazil to Pittsburgh, Vol. 2, is Navio Negregiro: The Ships of Enslavement" is a new work created by organization founder [Mestre Nego Gato] along with Paco Gomes. This work is a combination of Modern and Traditional dances that tells the story of the Middle Passage from African and the subsequent struggles in Brazil to regain their freedom. This production runs April 6 and 7 at 8 p.m. at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater and the goal again according to Mestre Gato is to "share the beauty, variety and dynamic power of Afro-Brazilian culture."
Details of several books published during the past year that examine human ownership as experienced in Africa, Britain, South America, the United States, and the West Indies
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
374 p., This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space. Includes "É a senzala: slavery, women, and embodied knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé" by Rachel Elizabeth Harding, "'I smoothed the way; I opened doors': women in the Yoruba-Orisha tradition of Trinidad' by Tracey E. Hucks, and "Joining the African diaspora: migration and diasporic religious culture among the Garifuna in Honduras and New York" by Paul Christopher Johnson.
