Ball,Erica (Editor), Pappademos,Melina (Editor), and Stephens,Michelle Ann (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Special journal issue; Issue 103 of Radical history review, Winter 2009., 246 p., Addresses transnational discourses of race, gender, and sexuality in African diaspora politics, African diaspora experiences on the African continent, the politics of African-descended peoples in Europe, and creative uses of the discourses of memory and diaspora to support political organizing and local struggles. Essays on Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Mexicans address the status of race in the study of African-descended populations and cultures in Latin America.
Tishken,Joel E. (Editor), Falola,Toyin (Editor), and Akínyẹmí,Akíntúndé (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
365 p., Explores Sango religious traditions in West Africa and beyond. It considers the spread of polytheistic religious traditions from West Africa, the mythic Sango, the historical Sango, and syncretic traditions of Sango worship. Includes Stephen D. Glazier's article "Wither Sàngó? : an inquiry into Sàngó's "authenticity" and prominence in the Caribbean."
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
394 p., Manning begins in 1400 and traces five central themes: the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community; discourses on race; changes in economic circumstance; the character of family life; and the evolution of popular culture. His approach reveals links among seemingly disparate worlds. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, slavery came under attack in North America, South America, southern Africa, West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India, with former slaves rising to positions of political prominence. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, the near-elimination of slavery brought new forms of discrimination that removed almost all blacks from government for half a century.
"This essay addresses the horrific struggles of enslaved Africans during the "Middle Passage" and argues that the "Black Atlantic" can be considered as a form of existential crucifixion for those whose lives were decimated during the traversing of this oceanic divide between their old world and the new. The author argues that this existential crucifixion represents a kind of collective experiential-historical "Low Saturday" for Diasporan African peoples, in that the failure of full freedom to emerge for "us" suggests that Easter Sunday is an aspirational dream rather than a contextual reality." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Okpewho,Isidore (Editor) and Nzegwu,Nkiru (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
531 p., Traces the immigrants' progress from expatriation to arrival and covers the successes as well as problems they have encountered as they establish their lives in a new country. Includes Georges E. Fouron's "I, too, want to be a big man" : the making of a Haitian "boat people"; John A. Arthur's "Immigrants and the American system of justice: perspectives of African and Caribbean Blacks"; and Perry Mars' "The Guyana diaspora and homeland conflict resolution."
