For [Heidi Rondon], the opportunity to express her African roots through music and dance was a calling. "In our veins we carry the African feeling," she explained. "We are direct descendants of slaves that cultivated cocoa and coffee in the central coast of Barlovento many years ago." "These Africans were Latin America's first liberators," says historian and activist Jorge Guerrero Valez accompanying the group. A dignified Venezuelan enormously conscious of his African heritage and history, Jorge spoke eloquently about the solidarity Afro-Venezuelans, as they call themselves, feel with their African American brothers and sisters in the United States and the need to enhance the relationship.
Storyteller, poet, and culinary anthropologist Vertamae Grosvenor displays the pleasures of African-Atlantic cooking in "Vertamae Cooks in The Americas' Family Kitchen," and in her new series debuting on PBS in October, In both the book and the series, Vertamae shows how African tastes and traditions have influenced the various cuisines of America, acquiring new flavors and ingredients along the way in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. With humor, insight, and gusto, Vertamae shares anecdotes and history as she prepares more than a hundred mouth-watering, down-home recipes. The recipes range from the deliciously unique to the comfortingly familiar, from the spiciness of Bahian Shrimp Creole to the pleasure of sweet potato pie.
"Once again, WLIB's commitment to New York's African American and Caribbean communities has been confirmed. We have devoted significant air time to voter registration drives, Public Service Announcements and other programs specifically organized to motivate our listeners to vote," said Janie Washington, station manager.
[Rosa Guy]'s novels have explored the stifling consequences of poverty in settings as far away as the Caribbean, or as near as New York's Harlem for over 30 years. Once it is published, "The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind" will join an impressive body of literary material authored by Ms. Guy that includes "Bird At My Window," "A Measure of Time," "And Then She Heard of Bird Sing," "Edith Jackson," "Ruby," "Children of the Longing" and "Music of Summer." "I believe I write for everybody," says Guy., "Young people like my work because I don't talk down to them." This attitude helps explain the on-going popularity of her "Imamu Jones Mystery Series," a crossover favorite among both Black and White young readers. Many of them have come of age reading the suspenseful "Mystery Series" which focuses on the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn teen struggling to define his manhood.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., Collection of profiles, interviews, essays and reviews on such well-known black writers and artists as Nalo Hopkinson, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Lawrence Hill and Edwidge Danticat constitutes a frank conversation on the significance of race in contemporary Black Canadian and American literature.
Describes individuals’ reasons for participating in cognitive screening and reasons to pursue testing after screening across 4 ethnic groups: African American, Afro-Caribbean, European American, and Hispanic American.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.
