African Consciences is a Parisian based initiative of artistes from the `Black Atlantic' and Africa. They use music to shape a discourse on their identity in relation to Africa, strongly bound to consciousness. The musical itinerary provided by reggae and hip hop constitutes what they see as a means for action to bring alive a "global African network". In this chapter I will reconsider the practice of repatriation, and the meanings it conveys now. I will try to analyse it through African Consciences' "Door of no Return" where they intend to travel back the road of the trans Atlantic trade in Africans. African Consciences has a mediated relation to Africa through roads that join their musical practice to their understanding of African history and tradition. It also carries an ideological intent to bring forth a global Africa through the articulation of routes and roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
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.
In an effort to push the literature on music and collective identity to examine how the cognitive dimension of collective identity gets constructed, a study shifts away from the customary focus on lyrics, toward an analysis of the everyday discursive contexts of music scenes, such as rehearsals, informal commentary, and training seminars. By examining such contexts within the black gospel music scene in São Paulo, Brazil, the study discovers that a complex ideology of racial identity, infused with ideas drawn from North American history and the Bible, circulates within the scene.
Discusses 1) the concept of blackness in Latin America during the fifteenth century and gives historical background on how the concept of blacks and Indians evolved in Latin America; 2) the social construction of race by West European colonizers in Latin America during the early sixteenth century; and 3) the indigenous concept of blackness among indigenous cultures in latin America.
this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of 'whiteness' in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.
Uses data from the National Survey of American Life to investigate explore ethnic heterogeneity among black Americans, with a sample of 2,953 African Americans and 1,140 Caribbean Blacks. For African Americans black group evaluation, self-esteem, and mastery reduce depressive symptomatology. For Caribbean Blacks racial identity and psychosocial resources were all directly and inversely related to depressive symptoms.
Examines racial politics in Brazil by analyzing the city of Salvador da Bahia's cultural policies over time and their relationship to national ideology and racial identity in Brazil more generally. It argues that the re-Africanization of Salvador's Carnival and its historical center, the Pelourinho, although initially products of the mobilization of Afro-Bahians themselves, have become institutionalized and ironically serve today as testaments to Brazil's diversity, tolerance, and integration.
This article explores Japanese literary engagement with the Caribbean island of Jamaica, one informed most directly by the recent popularity of Jamaican musical culture in Japan. I link these works to a discursive imagination of the international, including the Third World, as a proving ground for artistic accomplishment and for the acquisition of an ideological cosmopolitanism counterposed against life in insular Japan. This includes the discourse of jibun sagashi, or self-searching, that has emerged in the post-1991 recessionary era. I argue that a consistent trope in many works of fiction and non-fiction on Japanese travel to Jamaica is of their protagonists' or authors' intimate encounter with Afro-Jamaican blackness as both menacing and impoverished, but also vitalizing and endearing. Encountering the Afro-Jamaican, and surviving it, simultaneously affords a sense of toughness and sociopolitical enlightenment impossible elsewhere in Japan. I conclude that although these narratives usually include returns to a Japanese homeland appreciated anew, an ethnographic perspective on these issues - though not the focus of the paper - suggests that the experiences of less famous Japanese youth travelling to Jamaica might complicate these narratives offered to mainstream audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
