In the Belly of the Tambu: Curaçao's African Heritage and the Re-Imagination of a Nation

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Roe
Keyword(s):  
African Heritage

Bomba: The Sound of Puerto Rico’s African Heritage

2021 ◽  
pp. 104837132199066
Author(s):  
Vimari Colón-León
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
West African ◽  
Learning Sequence ◽  
Significant Evidence ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Main Components

Bomba is an emblematic Puerto Rican musical genre that emerged 400 years ago from the colonial plantations where West African slaves and their descendants worked. It remains one of the most popular forms of folk music on the island and serves as significant evidence of its rich African heritage. This article explores the main components of bomba by making them more accessible to those that have not experienced it from an insider’s perspective. The material presented in this article provides a learning sequence that could take the form of several lessons, or even a curricular unit. Transcriptions of rhythms typically learned aurally are also included.

Staying strong: Exploring experiences of managing emotional distress for African Caribbean women living in the UK

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Graham ◽  
Victoria Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Emotional Wellbeing ◽  
Strong Black Woman ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Uk

The “strong Black woman” (SBW) is a Western cultural stereotype that depicts African-heritage women as strong, self-reliant, independent, yet nurturing and self-sacrificing. US research indicates that this stereotype negatively impacts the emotional wellbeing of African-heritage women, while also allowing them to survive in a racist society. UK research has documented the significance of this stereotype in relation to African Caribbean women’s experience of depression around the time of childbirth and “attachment separation and loss”. However, research is yet to explore how UK African Caribbean women make sense of and negotiate the SBW stereotype in relation to their emotional wellbeing more broadly. Using five focus groups, with a total of 18 women, this research explored how these women experienced and managed emotional distress in relation to the SBW stereotype. The importance of “being strong” consistently underpinned the participants’ narratives. However, this requirement for strength often negatively impacted their ability to cope effectively with their distress, leading them to manage it in ways that did little to alleviate it and sometimes increased it. This study offers important implications for understanding the experiences of emotional distress for UK African Caribbean women.

Re: My Journey Through African Heritage

African Arts ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-10
Author(s):  
Alan Donovan
Keyword(s):  
African Heritage

Superb Intentions and U.S. Policy Constraints

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Wiley
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Global Education ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
Debt Burden ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Second Year ◽  
Global Identities ◽  
Commander In Chief ◽  
The U.S

Barack Obama's election was an extraordinary event in American and world history, but already in his second year as president, the luster and the popularity of the Obama administration has faded, even among many who mobilized to elect him. In addition to righting two wars, Obama is attempting to fix a broken health care system in the context of a nationally contentious electorate and Congress. He also is coping with a mounting debt burden from seeking to recover from an economic collapse and public anger at an environmental disaster of mega proportions, requiring him to rein in the banks and corporations that were unleashed from public regulation during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. In addition, he is commander-in-chief of the U.S. military and its rapidly expanding U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).This was an administration elected on “hope for change.” Indeed, Obama's election raised expectations across the U.S. and throughout Africa that a man of African heritage, indeed a global person, could be and had been elected. This quintessentially optimistic, intelligent, and gifted American is the product of a Kenyan father and an internationally engaged mother, a multicultural childhood, and a global education as graduate of a private secondary school and elite American universities, and he has been pinned simultaneously with American, biracial, African American, African, and even global identities (see Zeleza 2009).

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

“Traditional” Venḓa Women’s Beadwork Accessing the Contemporary Tourist Market in South Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-224
Author(s):  
Mathodi F. Motsamayi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Limpopo Province ◽  
The Past ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Trading Networks

Beads and beadwork have played a role in South Africa’s Limpopo Province dating back to the pre-colonial times. Whether the beads were produced locally or imported via trading networks, the region already had a rich tradition of constructing beadwork before the arrival of Europeans. Today, this tradition is continued by new generations of women beaders. It has been found that literature on contemporary Limpopo beadwork produced by Vhavenḓa women is scarce. This article addressed this imbalance. It is vital to state that, during the last decade and in the context of South African heritage and tourism, there has been a steadily increasing number of scholarly studies on Nguni beadwork. This study offered new insights into contemporary beadwork traditions. It also contributed to an understanding of Vhavenḓa beading by drawing on the knowledge and experience of beadworkers, identifying influences from the past, and countering some stereotypical perceptions of beadwork production.

scholarly journals RELIGIÃO E IDENTIDADE CULTURAL NEGRA: AFRO-BRASILEIROS, CATÓLICOS E EVANGÉLICOS

Afro-Ásia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vagner Gonçalves da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Black Identity ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Black Movement ◽  
The Relationship

<p class="abstract">Nas últimas décadas, vários grupos religiosos têm se posicionado sobre a relação entre “identidade negra”, cultura e religião. Neste ensaio, pretendo apresentar algumas tendências do debate contemporâneo entre o campo religioso afro-brasileiro, o movimento negro católico e o evangélico. Sugiro que esse debate se constrói a partir de posições gestadas nas relações de uns com os outros e com as políticas públicas voltadas para a patrimonialização dos símbolos das heranças africanas no Brasil.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>:<strong> </strong>religiões afro-brasileiras - catolicismo - evangélicos - <br /> movimento negro - identidade negra.</p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>In recent decades, various religious groups have positioned themselves with regard to the relationship between “black identity”, culture and religion. In this essay, I present some trends in the contemporary debate between the African-Brazilian religious field, the black Catholic and evangelical movements. I suggest that this debate is constructed from gestated positions in relation to each other as well as the public policies directed towards the patrimonialization of symbols of African heritage in Brazil.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Keywords</strong>:<strong> </strong>African-Brazilians religions - Catholicism - evangelicals -<br />black movement - black identity</p>

scholarly journals The Black Culture Movement and the Black Community

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-214
Author(s):  
John Runcie
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black Child ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Skin Bleaching ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Media

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.

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