Although the program has a long, academic-sounding formal tide, "Sugar, Slavery and Imperialism: How Sugar Drove the Forced Migration of Africans to the Caribbean and the Impact of the Haitian Revolution," it is an informal presentation aimed at general audiences. This is a rare opportunity to learn more about Haiti's former status, as the richest, rather than the poorest, country in the hemisphere; about Haitian participation in the American Revolutionary War and aid to other independence struggles; about the brilliant diplomatic and military leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines, Petion and others, who defeated the forces of Napoleon, Britain and Spain together; about how the Haitian victory caused Napoleon to sell the vast Louisiana territory to the United States, and about the great heroism of ordinary Haitians that was required for victory to be won. (The Louisiana Purchase, which will be commemorated on specially minted nickel coins in 2004, also opened the way for an expanded domestic "slave trade" within the United States, which was even larger than the former Atlantic trade).
Attorney Michael Etienne, Irvence St. Jean, President of United for Haiti, Sandra JeanPierre, owner of WOW Factor Weddings and Events and the Fernande Saint Jean, the host for United for Haiti Gala, enjoy a night of celebration at the United for Haiti First Annual Black Tie Gala at FIU.
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.
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.
