Roots, Routes, and Returns

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuire Valkeakari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Caribbean Diaspora ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter examines Caryl Phillips’s, Cecil Foster’s, and Edwidge Danticat’s depictions of contemporary African Caribbean encounters with the United States and Canada, with a particular focus on the complexities of “return”—a theme that facilitates discussions about “origins” and “home” and about formations of both diasporic and national identities and solidarities. A State of Independence (Phillips), Sleep on, Beloved (Foster), and Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat) all depict black Caribbean-born diasporans’ return trips back to the Caribbean. In all their complexity, these visits and their existential consequences play a pivotal role in how Phillips’s, Foster’s, and Danticat’s protagonists interpret their pasts and envision their future identities as members of their families, of two nations, of the Caribbean diaspora, and of the African diaspora.

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 Americocentrism and Art of the Caribbean: Contours of a Time–Space Logic

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
LEON WAINWRIGHT
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Space Logic

Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America.

scholarly journals Notions of Home: Re-Locations and Forging Connections in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashma Shamail
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Parental Home ◽  
The West ◽  
Caribbean Immigrants ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean

Focusing on the African Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, this paper examines the work of novelist Paule Marshall, whose narratives document issues of migration, displacement, home, return, and community bonding. Paule Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), focuses on Selina Boyce, a second-generation Barbadian immigrant from the United States, whose search for her roots is informed by an inherent link to the Caribbean through an articulation of the dynamics of belonging. The notion of ‘home’ as a contradictory and contested trope is vital, for the writer’s foremost concern is on the overarching effect it has on the diasporic subject. Marshall grants her protagonist the space to challenge familial struggles, and reclaim her voice by re-locating to Barbados, her parental home. The protagonist’s enigmatic journey through ambivalent interspaces enables her to reconstruct bridges to the West Indies. Marshall’s examination of her young protagonist’s ‘return to the Caribbean’ reflects wider issues of diasporic identity and belonging connected to ‘home’ spaces, ancestral lands, regions, and origins.

Embodiment, Reciprocity, and Reception

2019 ◽  
pp. 498-524
Author(s):  
Ann E. Mazzocca ◽  
Denise Gillman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
African Caribbean

This chapter explores meaning-making and reception in a range of Shakespeare adaptations within the black Atlantic context. Inspired by the authors’ own collaboration incorporating African Caribbean folkloric dance into Shakespeare’s Pericles: Prince of Tyre, the chapter examines historical and contemporary adaptations, revealing multiple ways in which African and African diaspora themes and cultural forms signify within Shakespeare’s colonial context. Orson Welles’s 1936 Negro Theatre Project’s production known as “Voodoo” Macbeth, Aimé Césaire’s 1969 adaptation, Une Tempête, and a more contemporary adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2013, directed by Justin Emeka, offer a range of diverse historical and cultural contexts in which African and African diaspora knowledges signify, including the United States’ neo-colonial occupation of Haiti, the postcolonial negritude and pan-Africanism movements, and contemporary Harlem. The results reveal modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary discourses through various significations of African and African diaspora embodied knowledges.

“Changing Locations”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Boyce Davies
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Caribbean Diaspora ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Literary Movements

This chapter analyzes literary examples of issues of migration. Capturing the dynamics of migration via song, poem, play, film, or novel has been consistently a theme in the Caribbean experience and is perhaps one of its central aesthetic features. Just as movement is a central component of the blues aesthetic in the African American cultural field, the chapter proposes that the assumption of space in the Caribbean be read as similarly potent. Although there are several literary movements, the chapter focuses on two visible largely Anglophone locations, two pathways among a variety of possible entry points to this discussion. It begins by considering the work of Claude McKay, the signature writer of the Caribbean encounter with the United States and the beginning of Caribbean diaspora formation.

Revolution and Intervention in Grenada: The New Jewel Movement, the United States, and the Caribbean.

1987 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 734
Author(s):  
Richard Hart ◽  
Kai P. Schoenhals ◽  
Richard A. Melanson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Caribbean
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