263 p., Focuses on the writing and thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in order to explore the continuing effects of the legacy of enslavement as well as question the need for entre nous black spaces in the twenty-first century. In pairing Du Bois with Hurston, the author considers the difficulties of entre nous speaking along generational lines, gender differences, and regional affiliations. Though their writing and speaking differed, as scholars and artists they resisted the demands of the minstrel mask to produce a body of work that subverted dominant culture's devaluation of black folk responses to ongoing racial terror and dehumanization. Hurston and Du Bois did this while trying to conceptualize what a black "us" in the United States and in the black diaspora in the Americas entailed and what, if anything, exists between the "us."
369 p., Reconstructs the process of migration, assimilation, and the realization of full sociopolitical participation in the United States in terms of the relationship between peoples of African descent--who were compelled to migrate as slaves across the Middle Passage, and who also voluntarily immigrated from various localities within the Black Atlantic--and select groups of immigrants from other locations around the globe. The author concentrates on novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Chris Ware, and examine closely how these authors, in their respective texts, work to restructure, reimagine, and thereby challenge the enshrined American narratives of national belonging and acculturation through literary constructions of the identities and experiences of peoples of African descent, as migrants themselves, in tandem with their social, political, economic, sexual, racial, and cultural engagements with other immigrants to the nation-state.
169 p., Examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, the author refers to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy."
In her book Louisiana, Erma Brodber reflects on the alliances that should exist between the African American and Afro Caribbean peoples, symbolically repairing the fissures that exist between the two, while addressing an uncommon subject in Caribbean migrant literature. Brodber's literary themes toward the unification of the relationships shared amongst the black diaspora articulate the legal tensions and national differences that can impede these alliances. Although Brodber's novel approaches this by creating a reconnection of the African diaspora in a borderless and nationless transmigration, and sometimes through a spaceless spirit world, Page argues that in reality this reunification is affected by the rules of the state that simply cannot be ignored.;
This essay analyzes representations and imaginaries of blackness in contemporary Puerto Rico, by focusing on the debates raised by 'Raices'/(Roots) (2001), the Banco Popular video special about traditional Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms of bomba and plena. These debates divided public opinion in Puerto Rico and included members of academia, musicologists, bomba and plena groups, and the San Anton (Ponce) community residents. They refer to the ways Puerto Ricans 'speak the unspoken,' that is, the ways Puerto Ricans talk about race and its intersectionalities on the island and in the diaspora.
It may take a while to determine if the region's tour de force at the U.S. capital during the June 19-21 "Conference on the Caribbean - A 20/20 Vision" - which also attracted non-CARICOM member representatives such as Haiti's President Rene Preval, Belize's Prime Minister Said Musa and top representatives of institutions including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the Organization of American States (OAS) - was merely an extravagant "talk shop" or, in fact, laid the groundwork to achieve tangible benefits from Caribbean-U.S. relations on thorny matters, including trade, security, economic development and immigration. What the Caribbean publicly said it hoped to accomplish at the three-day conference was to tell the U.S. of its new-found evolution and plans to bond more closely as a region in pursuit of prosperity. At the end of the conference a joint US.-Caribbean communiqué acknowledged the region's requests and expressed "unequivocal commitment to a secure and prosperous region and future benefits for all our citizens." "I don't believe it will just be a 'talk shop'," said Dr. Basil K. Bryan, Jamaica's consul general to New York. "I think thing will happen, but at a policy level I think it will take a little time for things to germinate. But we're all looking forward, positively, for something to happen out of this conference."
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.
480 p., By the end of 1825, 6,000 African Americans had left the United States to settle in the free black Republic of Haiti. After arriving on the island, 200 immigrants formed an enclave in what is now Samaná, Dominican Republic. The Americans in Samaná continued to speak English, remained Protestant (in a country of devout Catholics), and retained American cultural practices for over 150 years. Relying on historical archaeological methods, this dissertation explores the processes of community formation, maintenance, and dissolution, while paying particular attention to intersections of race and nation.
Discusses an investigation into the archaeology of the African Diaspora carried out in 2001 in Guadeloupe. In this first attempt to identify archaeological remains associated with the living spaces of enslaved Africans in the French West Indies
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
322 p., Kweh-kweh is an African Guyanese pre-wedding ritual system that emerged among African slaves in Guyana and historically functioned as a medium for music-centered matrimonial instruction for soon-to-be-married couples. The ritual is executed on the eve of a wedding ceremony and encompasses music, dance, proverbial speech, and a plethora of ritual practices that allow participants to chide, praise, and instruct the bride and groom and their nations (relatives, friends, and representatives) on matters of marriage. However, kweh-kweh performances also reveal embedded values of the Guyanese community, such as what it means to be a "real man" or a "proper woman." African Guyanese hold conflicting views on kweh-kweh, but at the onset of a wedding, they devise ways to celebrate kweh-kweh, a "pagan" ritual they also regard "our culture." This work demonstrates how African Guyanese manipulate the kweh-kweh ritual, their religious values, and themselves to articulate the complex of their identities, particularly racial and gendered identities.
Explores the idea of diaspora and musical exchanges in relation to changes in Colombian popular music, specifically that from the Caribbean coastal region of the country, often identified as more or less African-influenced. It traces changes that occurred from the 1920s onward, with the commercialization of cumbia and porro and related styles, and looks also at more recent developments around vallenato, champeta, and rap.
Olaniyan,Tejumola (Author) and Sweet,James H. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
363 p., "Most of the book's chapters derive from a two-day international symposium held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in March 2006." Includes Paget Henry's "Caribbean Sociology, Africa, and the African Diaspora" and Carolyn Cooper's "African Diaspora Studies in the Creole-Anglophone Caribbean: A Perspective from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica"
Arthur,John A. (Author), Takougang,Joseph (Author), and Owusu,Thomas Y. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
326 p, Four overarching themes underscore the essays in this book. These are the creation of African diaspora community and institutional structures; the structured and shared relationships among African immigrants, host, and homeland societies; the construction and negotiation of diaspora spaces, and domains (racial, ethnic, class consciousness, including identity politics; and finally African migrant economic integration, occupational, and labor force roles and statuses and impact on host societies.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Searching for promised lands: conceptualization of the African diaspora in migration / John A. Arthur, Joseph Takougang and Thomas Owusu -- The role of Ghanaian immigrant associations in Canada / Thomas Owusu -- Identity formation and integration among bicultural immigrant Blacks / Msia Kibona Clark -- Identity politics of Ghanaian immigrants in the Greater Cincinnati area: emerging geography and sociology of immigrant experiences / Ian E. A. Yeboah -- Reconciling multiple Black identities: the case of 1.5 and 2.0 Nigerian immigrants / Janet T. Awokoya -- Making in-roads: African immigrants and business opportunities in the United States / Joseph Takougang and Bassirou Tidjani -- Geography of globalized nursing markets: Zimbabwean migrant nurse trajectory and work experiences in the United Kingdom / Ian E. A. Yeboah and Tatenda T. Mambo -- Relationships among Blacks in the diaspora: African and Caribbean immigrants and American-born Blacks / Nemata Blyden -- Conceptualizing the attitudes of African Americans towards United States immigration policies / John A. Arthur -- African immigrant relationships with homeland countries / Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome -- African women in the new diaspora: transnationalism and the (re)creation of home / Mary Johnson Osirim -- Border questions in African diaspora literature / Hilary Chala Kowino -- Modeling the determinants of voluntary reverse migration flows and repatriations of African immigrants / John A. Arthur -- Africans in global migration: still searching for promised lands / John A. Arthur and Thomas Owusu.
Bryant,Sherwin K. (Author), O'Toole,Rachel Sarah (Author), and Vinson,Ben (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
279 p, The Shape of a Diaspora : The Movement of Afro-Iberians to Colonial Spanish America / Leo Garofalo -- African Diasporic Ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650 / Frank "Trey" Proctor -- To Be Free and Lucumí : Ana de la Calle and Making African Diaspora Identities in Colonial Peru / Rachel Sarah O'Toole -- Between the Cross and the Sword : Religious Conquest and Maroon Legitimacy in Colonial Esmeraldas / Charles Beatty-Medina -- Finding Saints in an Alley : Afro-Mexicans in Early Eighteenth-Century Mexico City / Joan Cameron Bristol -- The Religious Servants of Lima, 1600-1700 / Nancy E. van Deusen -- Whitening Revisited : Nineteenth-Century Cuban Counterpoints / Karen Y. Morrison -- Tensions of Race, Gender, and Midwifery in Colonial Cuba / Michele B. Reid -- The African American Experience in Comparative Perspective : The Current Question of the Debate / Herbert S. Klein; Time: To 1830
Bryant,Sherwin K. (Editor), O'Toole,Rachel Sarah (Editor), and Vinson,Ben III (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
279 p, Africans to Spanish America expands the diaspora framework to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African diaspora in the Spanish empires. Analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities.
"The state of Afro-Latin studies is reviewed, starting with questions about terminology and racial classification, then exploring issues of racism and the relation between race and class. The impact of black (and indigenous) social movements on the field of study is then examined and this raises the question of how ideologies and practices of mestizaje have changed in the wake of ethnic mobilization and challenges to nation-building narratives of mestizaje. Finally, some of the implications of the concepts of diaspora and globalization are examined in relation to approaches to black culture. Adapted from the source document." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., A study of the interchange between Cuba and Africa of Yoruban people and culture during the 19th century, with special emphasis on the Aguda community.
Reiter,Bernd (Author) and Simmons,Kimberly Eison (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
314 p, By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas. Includes Faye V. Harrison's "Building black diaspora networks and meshworks for knowledge, justice, peace, and human rights."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Website presents information about African culture in Cuba, including resources on music, dance, festicals, events, authors, teachers, theater, film, conferences, local news and organizations.
Santa Domingo, República Dominicana: Editora Manati
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Articles previously published in the newspaper Hoy of the Dominican Republic., 118 p., Contents: Afrodominicano por elección/negro por nacimiento --
Para ser dominicano hay que incluirlo todo : los pesimistas dominicanos y su Haití dialéctico --
Historias de hombres y mujeres libres/historias cimarronas --
¿Somos étnicamente taínos? --
Los africanos/negros en la fundación y desarrollo de Santo Domingo --
Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
307 p, Contents: On diaspora and the Akan in the Americas -- Quest for the river, creation of the path: Akan cultural development to the sixteenth century -- History and meaning in Akan societies, 1500-1800 -- The most unruly: the Akan in Danish and Dutch America -- The antelope (adowa) and the elephant (esono): the Akan in the British Caribbean -- All of the Coromantee country: the Akan diaspora in North America -- Diaspora discourses : Akan spiritual praxis and the claims of cultural idenitity
271 p., Uses W.E.B. Du Bois' reference to the worlds 'within and without the veil' as the narrative setting for presenting the case of an African-Bahamian urban cemetery in use from the early 18th century to the early 20th century. The author argues that people of African descent lived what Du Bois termed a 'double consciousness.' Thus, the ways in which they shaped and changed this cemetery landscape reflect the complexities of their lives. Since the material expressions of this cemetery landscape represent the cultural perspectives of the affiliated communities so changes in its maintenance constitute archaeologically visible evidence of this process. Evidence in this study includes analysis of human remains; the cultural preference for cemetery space near water; certain trees planted as a living grave site memorial; butchered animal remains as evidence of food offerings; and placement of personal dishes on top of graves.
Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer on Saturday. August 1 urged citizens to ensure that the horrible and dehumanising system of slavery is never allowed to happen again while encouraging closerunity between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Africa. "Therefore celebrating our Emancipation should inspire us to unite as citistens of the Caribbean to ensure that we never allow ourselves to be subjected to any form of slavery^'Spencer said in a message marking the 175th anniversary of the end of slavery.
Investigates the Islamic heritage of the Maroon societies in Jamaica and the Islamic nature of the Baptist Rebellion which brought an end to slavery in Jamaica and in the British West Indies. The Maroons are the enslaved Muslims who took flight or ran away from plantations in Jamaica. An overview of the African diaspora in the Americas, including Jamaica and the West Indies is presented. The strong Islamic faith of the Maroons are manifested in their use of Qur'anic terms, Islamic salutation, Islamic governance, Muslim names and Islamic actions.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Based on a conference which took place in Sandton, Johannesburg from 14-15 July 2008., 346 p., This conference is the first of three conferences on the African diaspora with respect to the returnee phenomenon of 'Back to Africa'. Contents: volume 1. Afro-Brazilian returnees and their communities -- volume 2. The ideology and practice of the African returnee phenomenon from the Caribbean and North-America to Africa.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
140 p, Includes Anne Dimock's "Capoeira Angola"; Bernice Reagon's "Interview with Freddy Massey, Director of the Guybau Invaders, Champion Steelband of Guyana"; and Leonard Goines' "Black music of Latin America and the Caribbean";
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
196 p., Argues that practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the city of Santiago de Cuba construct a religious genealogy inclusive of spirits to affirm their sense of an "African" identity in contemporary Cuba. Demonstrates that these practitioners' sense of being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and stewards of the blended spiritual knowledge created by sixteenth and seventeenth century AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese inhabitants of eastern/Oriente, Cuba.
400 p., This dissertation explores the spread and articulation of Garveyism--the political movement spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey--across Africa, the greater Caribbean, and the United States in the years following the First World War. Scholarship on Garveyism has remained fixed within a conceptual framework that views the movement synonymously with the rise and fall of Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and which focuses predominantly on the activities of the organization in the United States. This study argues that Garveyism is more fully rendered as a global endeavor of network-building, consciousness-raising, and activism that extended beyond the operational parameters of the UNIA, influenced a diverse array of regionally-constituted political projects, and nurtured the flowering of a profoundly "Garveyist" period in the history of the African diaspora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
359 p., Rather than hewing to labor uprisings in the 1930s as the generative moment for West Indian nationhood, the author begins with political and social conflicts from the late nineteenth century to argue that efforts to create a federation in the British Caribbean were much more than merely an imperial or regional nation-building project. This manuscript highlights the significant connections between Caribbean federation and other anticolonial struggles of the black diaspora.
78 p., Examines the ways in which the African American identity articulates and constructs itself through dance. Norman Bryson, an art historian, suggests that approaches from art history, film and comparative literature are as well applicable to the field of dance research. Therefore, as his main critical lens and a theoretical foundation, the author adopts the analytical approach developed by Erwin Panofsky, an art historian and a proponent of integrated critical approach, much like the one suggested by Bryson. Demonstrates that Erwin Panofsky's iconology, when applied as a research method, can make valuable contributions to the field of Dance Studies. Uses Katherine Dunham's original recordings of diaspora dances of the Caribbean and her modern dance choreography titled L'Ag'Ya to look for evidence for the paradigm shift from "primitive" to "diaspora" in representation of Black identity in dance also with the aim of detecting the elements that produce cultural difference in dance.
From the United States' perspective, it is very, very important for the (President George W) Bush administration to understand the location and the reality of the Caribbean's small economies. You cannot ignore them or you will have problems. You have somebody like (Venezuelan President) Hugo Chavez in the (Caribbean) region that is giving them (the U.S.) a headache. The (U.S.) better fortify the small countries or they will go over to whoever is helping them. People must survive and people must live. For the Caribbean in particular, it is a historical event. We are meeting as a Caribbean people. We seem to be sharing the same concerns every other CARICOMmember shares. From the U.S. standpoint, I really don't know because a lot of the feedback that we've had from our heads of state, we've heard this before... over the years and I'm not sure this is any different. The only thing that might be a little different now is the deportation of criminals to our shores and I don't believe that the U.S. does not know what the implication of that is. We are always seeking financial support from them, so to send us people who have been convicted for crimes that we don't have in the islands, somebody, somewhere, must know.
It may also have helped English-speaking migrants from the Caribbean that Florida served as a broad entry point for Caribbean migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and other countries: Where an area has a strong tradition of immigration, prevailing social attitudes are not likely to be as parochial as those in traditionally closed communities. Again, this is not to minimize the difficulties that particular migrants have faced; it is to acknowledge the fairly obvious point that some communities are less impenetrable for outsiders than others. A recent study by the British Cabinet Office has found that Caribbean women constitute a significant success story at the professional level. Specifically, for the generation born between 1940 and 1959, as many as 45 percent of the black women from the Caribbean, or who are of Caribbean heritage, now hold professional or managerial jobs, as against 27.3 percent of the black men in the same category. For the generation born between 1960 and 1979, 38.1 percent of the black women with Caribbean roots are professionals or managers, in comparison with 28.6 percent of the black men. These figures warn us that gender is now a significant factor in determining the prospects of Caribbean migrants to Britain, and they highlight the need for a broader examination of the factors that determine success for those who, in Claude McKay's words, may find themselves "a long way from home."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
250 p, Illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences.
The genesis of these carnivals carries the intent of resisting on some level, by Caribbean migrants, the otherwise alienating conditions of life in migration, to "carnivalise" these landscapes with some of the joy and space commensurate with Caribbean carnival. Indeed, Caribbean intellectual contributions have had successful impact on the development of U.S., European and African thought. Still, the Caribbean in most imaginings, and in particular to those who do not know it well, is the place of "sun and fun," a vacation land devoid of serious engagement with the world. Caribbean carnival then is the climax of all those "sun and fun" constructions. Yet, there is a history and politics to carnival - a "carnival of resistance" beyond the outer face of "carnival of tourism" - that demands exposure.
Compares memoirs by Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips. The Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that "Africa cannot cure." These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging.
Manuel,Zapata Olivella (Author) and Darío,Henao Restrepo (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
667 p, An extensive novel on the African diaspora in the Americas covering five hundred years of history. Covers black heroes, Yoruba religion, fairy tales and songs of African tradition.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
194p., Highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
317 p., While a great deal of postcolonial criticism has examined how the processes of hybridity, mestizaje, creolization, and syncretism impact African diasporic literature, Oakley employs the heuristic of the "commonplace" to recast our sense of the politics of such literature. Her analysis of commonplace poetics reveals that postcolonial poetic and political moods and aspirations are far more complex than has been admitted. African Atlantic writers summon the utopian potential of Romanticism, which had been stricken by Anglo-European exclusiveness and racial entitlement, and project it as an attain.
Adekunle,Julius (Editor) and Williams,Hettie V. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
334 p., A volume of 16 essays analyzing the issues of blackness and identity of the African Diaspora in global perspective. Focuses on the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Miles,Tiya (Author) and Holland,Sharon Patricia (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2006
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
364 p, "These essays explore the complex cultures, identities, and politics that arise in the space where black and native experiences converge." (Google)
The article reports on a conference on the history of the Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean regions, held in Berlin, Germany, from July 2-3, 2012. Topics of discussion included creole and African diasporic identities, racism, nationalism, and ethnic relations in Caribbean states such as Cuba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, and migration.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p., "By joining a diaspora, a society may begin to change its religious, ethnic, and even racial identifications by rethinking its "pasts." This pioneering multisite ethnography explores how this phenomenon is affecting the remarkable religion of the Garifuna, historically known as the Black Caribs, from the Central American coast of the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
317 p, Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora. The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena; Includes articles on Brazil and Jamaica
Heywood,Linda M. (Author) and Faustino,Oswaldo (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
Portuguese
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
São Paulo: Editora Contexto
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Portuguese translation of Linda Heywood, Central Africans and cultural transformations in the American diaspora selections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)., 222 p., Studies the importance of Central African culture to the cultures of the Americas since the Atlantic slave trade. Focusing on the Kongo/Angola culture zone, the book illustrates how African peoples re-shaped their cultural institutions as they interacted with Portuguese slave traders up to 1800, then follows Central Africans through all the regions where they were taken as slaves and recaptives.
Blacks and Latinos have numerous historical connections. The moors of North Africa occupied Spain from about 700-1400 A.D., about the time of the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Additionally, the slave trade which began with [Henry Louis Gates] the Navigator flourished from the 1440s, taking Africans into Portugal and Spain as servants. Many conquistadors of the New World brought with them free men of African ancestry. Finally, the Transatlantic Slave Trade sealed Afro-Hispanic connections as slaves intermingled voluntarily and involuntarily with their captors, creating variations in our color palate. Thus, our connections are longstanding. My point is that the African Diaspora experience, as was evidenced on Oscar night, is diverse and includes influences of blacks in Europe, Africa and all the Americas and the Caribbean. There are strands of the Diaspora in the Middle East, including Arab nations, and in places as unlikely as Mexico and China. So, blacks in America must begin to embrace our global heritage and we must also learn that our experiences are not superior but mere pieces of a wider tapestry of "colors." All are worth celebrating, researching and understanding. We are one great people cast to the winds by emigration and immigration, historical slavery, war, racial mixing and chance.
Curry,Dawne Y. (Editor), Duke,Eric D. (Editor), and Smith,Marshanda A. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Based on conference papers., 306 p., Perspectives on the black diaspora's global histories. Includes John Campbell's "How free is "free"? the limits of manumission for enslaved Africans in eighteenth-century British Caribbean sugar society," Beatriz G. Mamigonian's "A harsh and gloomy fate: liberated Africans in the service of the Brazilian state, 1830s-1860s," Stephen G. Hall's "Envisioning an antislavery war: African American historical constructions of the Haitian Revolution in the 1850s," Micol Seigel's "Comparable or connected? afro-diasporic resistance in the United States and Brazil," and Matthew J. Smith's "Race, color, and the Marxist left in pre-Duvalier Haiti." --
If Africans' forced Atlantic passage ushered in a colonial era that violently connected Africa and the Americas to Europe, Africans' travel to and on the Pacific as sailors, soldiers, dockworkers, and curious voyagers traced other kinds of crossings: linkages between black Atlantic subjects and Mexico, Native America, Polynesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, and other sites of flow through the global South. "Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Pacific" looks to innovate discussions of the African diaspora by tracing one possible route of this less-explored oceanography. Where does the black Atlantic meet the black Pacific? What would it mean to chart a story of the African diaspora not through the triangle trade crisscrossing that first ocean but as a continual navigation of many bodies of water -- Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Mississippi, Pacific -- and many waves of migration?
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p., Explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá , on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. Analyzes the texts Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998), Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000), and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
270 p., Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to US imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, the author traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans.
Examines what may be termed a historical fracture in the black diaspora in the United States, where African Americans and African Caribbeans still struggle to maintain and solidify friendships. Offers a close textual reading of Brown Girl Brownstones and The Friends to fully explore what fuels the tensions between group members. Concludes that coalition building and a rekindling of former friendships can heal this ruptured diaspora.
West,Michael O. (Editor), Martin,William G. (Editor), and Wilkins,Fanon Che (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., Focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the Black Power movement of the late twentieth century.
284 p., The Garifuna are a diasporic community that positions Yurumein (St. Vincent) at the center of its collective memory, and whose populations primarily reside in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and, more recently, in urban centers in the United States. This multi-sited, historio-ethnographic study traces the group's socio-political struggles over time and space against cultural dislocation, ethnic oppression, and culturally destructive forces.
Literary criticism of the books "Corregidora" by Gayl Jones and "Lucy" by Jamaica Kincaid. Examines the novels' depictions of mother-daughter relationships and analyzes the cultural and psychosocial forces encountered by the protagonists.
