African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
289 p, explores the multiple ways that Africans have affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the region. Focusing on areas traditionally associated with Afro-Latin American culture such as Brazil and the Caribbean basin, this innovative work also highlights places such as Rio de La Plata and Central America, where the African legacy has been important but little studied.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
383 p, Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures.
The first Africans came to America in August, so obviously, it's our entire history - in so far as the celebration or acknowledgement was. It has to do with [Jonathan Jackson], George Jackson and prisons. I believe in a time when the United States has more people in prison than any other industrialized nation, the prediction that if the current rate of incarceration stays the way it is now, one in three men will be incarcerated or on parole in 2020, which is not very far. I think it is contingent on us to look at that - the re-enslavement of African Americans continuing. I think this benefit for Haiti is important, because of what Haiti represents - a nearby island that had a successful slave rebellion, it has always suffered from intrusions from America from as far back as the 1800s, so I think joining together the national and international struggles is important. It is important for African Americans to look at themselves locally, nationally and internationally - to see ourselves in the world. Black August 2003 offers an opportunity to do that.
209 p., Explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience -- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"-- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations.
