Although the Americas and Caribbean region are purported to comprise different ethnic groups, this article’s focus is on people of African descent, who represent the largest ethnic group in many countries. The emphasis on people of African descent is related to their family structure, ethnic identity, cultural, psychohistorical, and contemporary psychosocial realities. This article discusses the limitations of Western psychology for theory, research, and applied work on people of African descent in the Americas and Caribbean region.
Journal Article, Taking an Afrocentric approach to the study of Africans who were enslaved by the Spanish in Mexico, the author traveled to Mexico on many occasions to study the retention of African cultural forms, concepts, practices, and values. This article provides the reader with a critical literature brief on the issues surrounding the current discourse.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The pioneering collector of African American music writes of a trip to West Africa where he found the cultural and historical roots for musical expression from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem. He recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.
Bilby,Kenneth M. (Author) and Neely,Daniel T. (Author)
Format:
Book, Section
Publication Date:
2009
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The Anglophone Caribbean islands are host to a rich and diverse tradition of dances and dance music adopted from European ballroom traditions. These traditions should be seen less as examples of “assimilation” than as products of a shared history of creativity, struggle, and adaptation among the colonized. Thus, for example, the related “tambrin” tradition of the island of Tobago has served as a vehicle for spirit possession in ceremonies with clear African-derived elements.
West African powers in the Caribbean have often been studied as important cultural and religious formations. This article treats them as ontological formations by collapsing the modern opposition between reason/knowledge and power/force. The distinction between the "knowing" West anchored in a unified scientific reason and the "believing" Rest who trust in many cultures is therefore refused. With the above prerequisite in mind, a new approach to creolization, termed "tukontology," is deployed to reveal a Kuhnian type paradigm shift in the war-medicine of blacks on British West Indian plantations between 1645 and emancipation in 1838.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
129 p., One of only a few studies using ethnographic research to document and analyze the self-identification and retention of African culture by Afro-Mexicans in Tamiahua, Veracruz, Mexico.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
An exploration of the relationship between music and social and political consciousness on the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, which is known for its vibrant musical traditions, all of which reflect the island’s ethnic diversity.
