African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, Provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk.
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.
Special journal issue: Communicating Pan-Africanism: Caribbean leadership and global impact, While kinship and political structures could not be transferred from Africa to the Caribbean under the conditions of forced migration, kinetic expressiveness, artistic skills and mental epistemologies were retained. These retentions covered domains such as religious ideas, musical instrumentation and morphology, dance choreography, culinary forms, hair and dress aesthetics, language syntax, economic activity and cooperation.
