The African diaspora in the Caribbean and Europe from pre-emancipation to the present day

2006 ◽  
pp. 219-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roswith Gerloff
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
The Caribbean

African and Black Diaspora as Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace R. Hall
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Involuntary Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
African Black ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Colonial Oppression

The African diaspora, also referred to as the African Black diaspora, is the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world. Even though voluntary widespread African diasporas occurred during precolonizing periods, the Arabic slave trade (7th to 18th centuries) and the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries) are largely recognized as phases of involuntary movement with an estimated combined 30 million Africans dispersed across the African continent and globally. Today, the largest populations of people descended from Africans forcibly removed from Africa reside in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, with millions more in other countries. Such vast movement of a people across time and space has meant that those who are part of the African diaspora have suffered similar problems and disadvantages. The legacy of slavery, especially in relation to racism and colonialism, has garnered attention across the scholarly disciplines of history, ethnic, cultural, and religious studies. Likewise, African and Black diasporan responses to colonial oppression have manifested in multiple curricula in literature, music, philosophy, politics, civilization, customs, and so forth, designed for and by African diasporans in their efforts to unite all people of African descent, building on their cultural identity and resisting racist ideology and colonial rule.

Romancing the Stone: Academe’s Illusive Template for African Diaspora Studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Melina Pappademos
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
North Americans ◽  
History Of ◽  
America South ◽  
Research Plan ◽  
The Caribbean

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.

Reflections of Durbar in the Diaspora

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Teleica Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Living Culture ◽  
The Caribbean

This article questions if the propensity of Black men in globally dominant western countries to wear black or dark colours is an outcome of internalized subjugation and an adherence to westernized projections of masculinity. It uses the 2018 Akinola Davies Junior film Zazzau as its backdrop, drawing parallels with other examples of colourful clothing in the context of Black masculinity. Zazzau shows the annual festival of Durbar, a vibrant celebration at the end of Ramadan in Kaduna State, Nigeria, where the Emir of the region and his entourage use traditional dress and contemporary fabrics to demonstrate their sartorial elegance. The bold and flamboyant dress of the men is not only indicative of the pageantry of this procession but is reminiscent of the creative exuberance and stylishness of annual carnivals in the Caribbean. This article uses this comparison as a tool to discuss a reengagement with the creativity, styling and colour of Black men’s clothing, and demonstrates how an engagement with colourful design aesthetics maintains its sense of masculinity. ‘Reflections of Durbar in the Diaspora’ draws parallels between the robes of the Emir, men’s costumes at carnival and the tailoring of Abrantie the Gentleman to examine how social engagement, living culture and traditional fashion intersect to influence and impact the ways in which men’s style is understood in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Mentoring Notes on African Diaspora Dance Styles and Continuity

2019 ◽  
pp. 180-202
Author(s):  
Yvonne Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
African Dance ◽  
The Caribbean

In this essay, Yvonne Daniel highlights the necessity of employing appropriate terminology when discussing African dance forms - terminology that distinguishes dance forms based on geographical, social, and stylistic histories. Daniel provides an analysis of Afro-Cuban dance categories while bridging to similar dance traditions found throughout the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. Daniel offers a pluralistic typography of African and Diaspora dance forms and allows a more precise legacy representation. She concludes with a set of recommendations for the mentoring of African Dance performers, researchers, and Performing Arts communities.

The politics of representing the African diaspora in the Caribbean

1994 ◽  
Vol 68 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308
Author(s):  
Kevin A. Yelvington
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Caribbean Culture ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jamaican Culture ◽  
The Way

[First paragraph]Roots of Jamaican Culture. MERVYN C. ALLEYNE. London: Pluto Press, 1988. xii + 186 pp. (Paper US$ 15.95)Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Dover MA: The Majority Press, 1991. xxii + 207 pp. (Paper US$ 9.95)A recent trend in anthropology is defined by the interest in the role of historical and political configurations in the constitution of local cultural practices. Unfortunately, with some notable individual exceptions, this is the same anthropology which has largely ignored the Caribbean and its "Islands of History."1 Of course, this says much, much more about the way in which anthropology constructs its subject than it says about the merits of the Caribbean case and the fundamental essence of these societies, born as they were in the unforgiving and defining moment of pervasive, persuasive, and pernicious European construction of "Otherness." As Trouillot (1992:22) writes, "Whereas anthropology prefers 'pre-contact' situations - or creates 'no-contact' situations - the Caribbean is nothing but contact." If the anthropological fiction of pristine societies, uninfluenced and uncontaminated by "outside" and more powerful structures and cultures cannot be supported for the Caribbean, then many anthropologists do one or both of the two anthropologically next best things: they take us on a journey that finds us exploding the "no-contact" myth over and over (I think it is called "strawpersonism"), suddenly discovering political economy, history, and colonialism, and/or they end up constructing the "pristine" anyway by emphasizing those parts of a diaspora group's pre-Caribbean culture that are thought to remain as cultural "survivals."

Black Power and/as Patriarchy

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-217
Author(s):  
Laurie R. Lambert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Global Consciousness ◽  
The Caribbean

In Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, David Austin continues his important work as the leading historian of 1960s black Montreal. Moving Against the System illuminates histories that are critical to an understanding of black radicalism in Canada, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora, more broadly. This work decenters the United States as the nexus of Black Power, allowing readers to think about Canada as an understudied site of black radical organizing. While the congress viewed Black Nationalism as a serious political framework for defeating both racism and colonialism, all the speakers were male. This essay critiques the masculinist politics of Black Power at the congress and analyzes how Austin navigates the absence of women’s voices among the congress’s speakers.

scholarly journals Do Black Wikipedians matter? Confronting the whiteness in Wikipedia with archives and libraries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Alexis Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Presence ◽  
The Caribbean

Wikipedia is in the top ten of the most visited websites in most places in the world and makes up the backbone of the Internet’s information ecosystem. Despite the global presence of the website and its sister projects, the knowledges of the African diaspora, in particular the Caribbean, are poorly represented. This chapter introduces and outlines Black-led projects, campaigns, and initiatives both within and outside of the formal networks of the Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation. The history and value of Black encyclopedic sources are explored and frame the important work by projects like Black Lunch Table, WikiNdaba, Ennegreciendo Wikipedia, and AfroCROWD, which were started to help these editors and bridge content gaps. In June 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation released a statement in support of Black Lives highlighting the support they provide to U.S.-based projects. This was followed with criticism from the community on missed opportunities to acknowledge the work and networks outside the United States of on-wiki communities, information activists, academics, independent scholars, and communities who often go unrecognized. This chapter explores how the system of white supremacy is a part of libraries and archives and Wikipedia; how Black-led shared knowledge information activists are circumventing the system; and suggestions for a more inclusive path forward.

scholarly journals Africans to Spanish America

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
Free People

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

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