The article reviews the book “'New Negroes from Africa': Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean," by Rosanne Marion Adderley.
Review of an art exhibit called 'Transforming the Crown: African Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996' which focuses on African Diaspora themes of displacement, homeland, nationhood, political ferment and identity
Discussed is the 'passion for Cuba' held by Dr. Robert Stephens, professor of music at the University of Connecticut-Storrs and interim director of the school's Institute for African American Studies
333 p., Examines both historical and contemporary attempts by the people of Ouidah, Benin Republic in West Africa and in the Caribbean country of Haiti to confront and reconcile their relationship via the transatlantic slave trade. Oral and visual narrative have been central to this process as people represent, reflect and interpret a past that is fraught with gaps, silences and erasures. Proposes that the process of remembrance mirrors a traditional rites of passage whereby one lives as part of a community, dies to the past and then is reborn anew in the community. Both Ouidahans and Haitians now occupy a liminal space--an exilic space--in which they struggle to remember a past that was for many years repressed and suppressed.
The article presents an examination into the history and influence of the Black community of Montevideo, Uruguay during the 19th and 20th centuries. Details are given noting how the African community of Montevideo became a powerful cultural and advocacy hub for the African diaspora in Latin America. Description is provided regarding the various racial identity issues which manifested themselves in the Uruguayan community during the period along with analysis of the means by which they were addressed such as African journalism, social institutionalism and other forms of cultural production.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
160 p, Twentieth-century Black literary and political figures of the United States and the Caribbean related to Africa in complex and ambivalent ways that did not prevent them from denouncing the social, economic, and political oppressions of the West against Blacks of Africa and its Diaspora from slavery through colonialism and neocolonialism.
