Discusses the oral and written life histories and other personal testimonies of African Americans. It clears up the realities behind invisible enclaves and spotlight of the immigrant's own history. Professor John H. McWhorter argues that modern America is the home to millions of immigrants who were born in Africa. He notes that their cultures and identities are separated between Africa and the U.S. However, his vision of an unencumbered, native-born black ownership of black is considered optimistic. Transnational identities of immigrants and their children are formed, negotiated and projected primarily within their experiences.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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273 p, Born of the union between African maroons and the Island Carib on colonial St. Vincent, and later exiled to Honduras, the Garifuna way of life combines elements of African, Island Carib, and colonial European culture. Beginning in the 1940s, this cultural matrix became even more complex as Garifuna began migrating to the United States, forming communities in the cities of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Moving between a village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and the New York City neighborhoods of the South Bronx and Harlem, England traces the daily lives, experiences, and grassroots organizing of the Garifuna.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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387 p, This text tells of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From 1838 to 1917 over half a million indentured labourers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they laboured on the sugar estates. In 1998 in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are an estimated one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago. Based on official reports and papers, and unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, this text aims to fill a gap in the history of the Caribbean, of India, Britain and other European colonial powers. (I.B. Tauris website);
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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239 p., Combines historical elements on the formation of Brazil in their ethnic identity and cultural character and shows the reader the contributions of Bantus in this process. Moreover, Nei Lopes sets new parameters on the relationship between Islam and negritude. By way of its involvement with the black cultural resistance in Brazil and Africa, presents the reader with a face of history unknown to most Brazilians.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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315 P., A historical and ethnographic case study of the politics of cultural struggle between two traditionally subordinate ancestral groups in Trinidad, those claiming African and Indian descent. Viranjini Munasinghe argues that East Indians in Trinidad seek to become a legitimate part of the nation by redefining what it means to be Trinidadian, not by changing what it means to be Indian.
Environmental determinism was not universally accepted at the end of the 19th century, but it was a useful philosophy for the men of the British Colonial Office who controlled the Crown's Caribbean colonies
