Walcott, Homer, and the ?Black Atlantic?

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
Isidore Okpewho
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic

Black Muslimness Mobilized

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef J. Carter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sufi Order

The Mustafawi Tariqa is a transnational Sufi Order that was initiated in 1966 by the late Cheikh Mustafa Gueye Haydara (d. 1989) in Thiès, Senegal. Yet, only since 1994 has this specific Sufi network reached westward across the water, bringing American Muslims—many of whom are converts—into the larger network. In the United States, the majority of students who have entered the Tariqa and have declared allegiance (bayah) to Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye Al-Faqir are African-Americans who have inserted themselves religiously, culturally, and pedagogically into a West African Sufi tradition which emphasizes religious study and the practice of dhikr (remembrance of God). Shaykh Arona Faye is a Senegalese religious leader who relocated to the southeastern region of the United States from West Africa to spread the religion of Islam and expose American Muslims to the rich West African tradition of spiritual purification and Islamic piety. At the same time, many of those who are African-American members of this tradition have made it a point to travel to Senegal themselves to strengthen transatlantic ties with West African compatriots and visit sacred burial sites in the small city of Thiès. I examine how two sites of pilgrimage for the Mustafawi—Moncks Corner, South Carolina and Thiès, Senegal—play a part in the infrastructure of Black Atlantic Sufi network. Moncks Corner is the central site in which access to the Tariqa’s most charismatic living shaykh, Shaykh Arona Faye, has worked for the past two decades teaching and mentoring those on the Path. On the other hand, Thiès is the location where the Tariqa’s founder is buried and travelers visit the town in order to pay homage to his memory. I show how these sites catalyze mobility and operate as spaces of spiritual refuge for visitors in both local and regional contexts by looking at how a local zawiyah produces movement in relation to a broader tariqa. By looking at pilgrimage and knowledge transmission, I argue that the manner in which esoteric approaches to spiritual care and the embodiment of higher Islamic ethics via the West African Sufi methodology of the Mustafawi informs the manner in which Muslims of varying African descent inhabit a broader diasporic identification of “Black Muslimness.”

Universal Suffrage as Decolonization

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
KEVIN DUONG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The Voice

This essay reconstructs an important but forgotten dream of twentieth-century political thought: universal suffrage as decolonization. The dream emerged from efforts by Black Atlantic radicals to conscript universal suffrage into wider movements for racial self-expression and cultural revolution. Its proponents believed a mass franchise could enunciate the voice of colonial peoples inside imperial institutions and transform the global order. Recuperating this insurrectionary conception of the ballot reveals how radicals plotted universal suffrage and decolonization as a single historical process. It also places decolonization’s fate in a surprising light: it may have been the century’s greatest act of disenfranchisement. As dependent territories became nation-states, they lost their voice in metropolitan assemblies whose affairs affected them long after independence.

Mooring Aslima

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Zainab Cheema
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Sex Worker

Abstract In Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, the entanglement of Spain and Morocco emerges through the diasporic figure of Aslima, the Moroccan sex worker. This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pandiasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.

Re-Membering the Black Atlantic

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic
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