African and African American Religions in the Early Americas

Author(s):  
Jason Young

This chapter chronicles the relationship between African religious practices on the continent and African American religion in the plantation Americas in the era of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s have demonstrated not only that African religious practices exhibit remarkable subtlety and complexity but also that these cultures have played significant roles in the subsequent development of religious practices throughout the world. Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion comprised a set of broad and varied religious practices that contributed to the development of creative, subtle, and complex belief systems that circulated around the African Diaspora. In addition, this chapter addresses some of the vexed epistemological challenges related to discussing and describing non-Western ritual and religious practices.

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Vaughn Booker

AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.


Author(s):  
Catherine Carstairs

While people often associate the opposition to community water fluoridation with the extreme right, most people opposed to fluoridation were concerned about the impact that it might have on health and the environment. In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-fluoridationists frequently mentioned the possibility that fluoride would accumulate in our bodies and in our environment, leading to long-term health problems. They were assisted by a new generation of scientists, interested in toxicology and environmental health, who began publishing articles critical of water fluoridation. By the 1970s, the environmental critique of water fluoridation was having a significant impact. For example, in the late 1970s, the legislation mandating compulsory water fluoridation in Quebec was suspended, largely because of environmental concerns. The debate over water fluoridation is just one example of how Canadians became more concerned about the relationship between the environment and human health in the second half of the twentieth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


Author(s):  
Richard Bates

AbstractFrançoise Dolto (1908-88) was a prominent French cultural figure thanks to her practice of dispensing psychoanalytically-informed child-rearing advice via the radio. From 1976 to 1978, on her show Lorsque l’enfant paraît, she responded to thousands of letters sent in by listeners requesting help with parenting problems and personal questions of a psychological nature. The article explores Dolto’s cultural position as a child psychoanalyst – understood in the 1960s and 1970s as a radical profession – but from a conservative, Catholic background. It then examines a sample of the letters sent in to her show, analysing the demographics of the correspondents and highlighting their most common concerns. Finally the article studies the relationship between psychoanalysis and trauma. It indicates the anxiety that a psychoanalytic understanding can cause, by reinforcing parents’ fears that childhood traumas are common, can be created unwittingly by parents, and lead to major psychological consequences in later life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Julia Stępniewska ◽  
Piotr Zańko ◽  
Adam Fijałkowski

In this text, we ask about the relationship between sexual education in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s with the cultural contestation and the moral (including sexual) revolution in the West as seen through the eyes of Prof. Andrzej Jaczewski (1929–2020) – educationalist, who for many years in 1970s and 1980s conducted seminars at the University of Cologne, pediatrician, sexologist, one of the pioneers of sexual education in Poland. The movie “Sztuka kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej” (“The Art of Love. The Story of Michalina Wisłocka” [1921–2005]), directed in 2017 by Maria Sadowska, was the impulse for our interview. After watching it, we discovered that the counter-cultural background of the West in the 1960s and 1970s was completely absent both in the aforementioned film and in the discourse of Polish sex education at that time. Moreover, Andrzej Jaczewski’s statement (July 2020) indicates that the Polish concept of sexual education in the 1960s and 1970s did not arise under the influence of the social and moral revolution in the West at the same time, and its originality lay in the fact that it was dealt with by professional doctors-specialists. We put Andrzej Jaczewski’s voice in the spotlight. Our voice is usually muted in this text, it is more of an auxiliary function (Chase, 2009). Each of the readers may impose their own interpretative filter on the story presented here.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.


Author(s):  
Peter Baker

Glauber Rocha de Andrade (Vitória da Conquista, 1939–1981) was a Brazilian film critic, screenwriter, producer, and director. Arguably the most important director of the cinema nôvo (New Cinema) movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he began his career as a film critic, writing for well-known Brazilian journals about Italian neorealism and the French New Wave – two crucial influences on his own work. His writings criticized Brazil's commercial cinema and called for a new type of film that would represent the reality of Brazilian life. His most famous essay in this regard is "Estética da Fome" ("An Esthetic of Hunger," 1965). The essay reflects on the neo-colonial condition of Brazilian cinema through the analogy of the starvation of the Brazilian people and the intellectual starvation of its cinematic tradition; anti-colonial revolutionary violence is the only possible solution to these plights. This theoretical viewpoint is reflected in his Deu e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964), a film which earned him recognition on the international scene and in Brazil as the unchallenged leader of a new generation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.


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