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.

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.

Black Men and Black Masculinity

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Alford A. Young
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Black Males ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Male Experience ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Research ◽  
Sociological Studies

In recent decades, sociological studies of black males and of black masculinity in America unfolded with great rapidity. In the 1960s, sociological studies of black males gained currency. Much of their focus has been on the problematic state of black males in education, employment, family life, peer and social relations, and within criminal justice systems. That tradition moved from employing a social problems lens for researching black men to documenting how their efforts in these and other spheres of life reflect creativity and efficacy as much as malaise and despair. Emerging several decades later in sociology, black masculinity studies began with an emphasis on how black males contended with hegemonic masculinity. This tradition moved to explore how sexual, socioeconomic, and other variations in the black male experience elucidated vulnerability as a common feature of that experience, as well as to more extensive visions of black masculinity. New research questions stand before both traditions that constitute the twenty-first-century agenda.

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.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Financial Autonomy ◽  
Jack Johnson

Since Jess Willard defeated Jack Johnson in 1915 through to Floyd “Money” Mayweather’s retirement in 2015, black fighters have continued to face challenges and obstacles to financial security. The same forces that push black men into the ring--poverty and a quest to assert their manhood in a society that tries to deny black masculinity--remain. But he also wants to be recognized for his manhood beyond the ring. To this end, he tries to take care of his family financially, and he invests his money in businesses or property. But when the fighter receives his earnings, he also buys the things he always wanted, the items that make him stand out in sporting society and give him an air of financial autonomy: cars, clothes, and jewelry.

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.

“Hannah Elias Talks Freely”

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Cheryl D. Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
White Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Policy Effects ◽  
White Couples ◽  
Racial Hatred ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Science News

The image of the buck or Mandingo, which has historically found expression in advertising, popular culture, science, news, law, and policy, effects a powerful purchase on our national psyche. The Mandingo’s figurative though sustained life illuminates the ways in which myths about black men’s bodies incite particular kinds of fantasies and instantiate specific relationships of power. Perhaps the most insistent archetype of black masculinity, the Mandingo has been mobilized by a number of actors, including black men who have sought to defy, appropriate, or reinvent the image. Framing black men as possessing a primitive, unquenchable, and even dangerous sexuality –a sexuality that thwarts prohibitions and demands containment– the Mandingo is an ideological construction invented by white heteropatriarchy to effectively police the racial-sexual border. Embedded in the Mandingo construct are potent opposing energies: racial hatred and racialized desire. How then does the mobilization of the Mandingo in contemporary cuckold pornography speak to the desire for and fear of black men as objects for pornographic consumption by white men and women? This chapter investigates the sexual economy of sub-cultural, amateur pornography in which black men are figured as BBC (big black cock) studs central to the fetishistic fantasies of white couples. Highlighting the multiple and mobile desires, relations, and labors evident in “cuckolding socialities”, this chapter looks at pornography as a market for black men’s sex work, and as a space of discipline and containment as well as of queer possibility.

From New Black Realism to Tyler Perry

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kameron J. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Successful Approach ◽  
Female Audience

In the midst of a revival of gospel theater aimed at Black female Christian audiences, Tyler Perry mastered a successful approach to Black independent gospel plays. Eventually, Perry transferred his work to the film screen, exploring the struggles of Black women in their relationships with Black men. While his depiction of Black men has garnered much controversy, Perry characterizes Black masculinity throughout his romantic storylines using a formulaic approach seeking to uplift his predominately Black female audience, while exploring the faults and various tropes of Black masculinity. In Perry’s female-oriented romantic storylines, Black men are usually categorized as an affluent shape-shifter, neglected love interest, transformed hard worker, crooked hoodlum, or Black messiah redux. Throughout this study, Perry’s usage of these characterizations is explored. Unlike 1990s New Black Realism films, which could have driven the explosion of female-oriented gospel-themed works, Perry fuses Black theological perceptions of manhood with a patriarchal-centered exploration of Black womanhood.

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."

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