Claude McKay’s Bad Nationalists

This article examines Claude McKay’s 1928 journey to Africa under colonial occupation and uncovers how these true events partly inspired his late work of expatriate fiction, Romance in Marseille. By bringing together migration studies with literary history, the article challenges and expands existing research that suggests that McKay’s writings register the impulse for a nomadic wandering away from oppressive forms of identity control set up in the wake of World War I. The article contends that Claude McKay’s renegade cast of “bad nationalist” characters registers a generative tension between the imperial national forms the author encountered in North Africa and the Black nationalist vision of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa campaign. Reading the dialectics of bad nationalisms and Black internationalisms, the article explores how the utopian promise for Black liberation by returning back to Africa, central to the New Negro project of Black advancement, frequently becomes entangled in McKay’s transnational stowaway fiction with conflicting calls for reparations, liabilities, and shipping damages.

Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies

ABSTRACTThis article presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.

Prince Hall: the origins of the Back-to-Africa Movement and black Freemasonry

This work examines in detail the biography and ideological and political views of Prince Hall, one of the most authoritative and at the same time one of the most mysterious representatives of the black rights movement in the United States. In the course of the analysis, the author dwells in detail on the circumstances of the formation of his socio-political philosophy. He comes to an unambiguous conclusion that it is impossible to attribute the theoretical views of this public figure either to black nationalism or to Pan-Africanism. At the same time, the author acknowledges that the views of the Grand Master of the African Lodge have a number of similarities with both of these ideologies. In particular, Prince Hall adhered to the concept of Ethiopianism and was among the first to put forward the idea of compensating African Americans for the years of slavery and return to the Black Continent. This certainly makes him related to such well-known ideologists of black nationalism as Martin Robison Delany, Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. But unlike those listed above, Hall remained a staunch egalitarian, a patriot, and an opponent of violent methods of struggle until the very end of his life, which contradicts this doctrine. In addition, this personage was at the origins of the repatriation movement and black Freemasonry, which earned him his great fame. The great contribution of Prince Hall to the cause of struggle against slavery as well as his place among the first and foremost abolitionists has never been questioned by researchers. At the same time, it had to be pointed out the significant degree of mythologization of the image of the Great Master and his biography which still causes a lot of controversy not only in the academic but also in the political and public community. That is why the work provides a number of versions and interpretations of the “well-known facts” of Hall’s biography. The author exposes them to a detailed critical analysis. In Russian historical science, this study is the first work to offer a critical scholarly interpretation of the biography of Prince Hall, the founder of black Freemasonry and the Back-to-Africa Movement. A number of sources are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

Revisiting the Out of Africa event with a novel Deep Learning approach

Anatomically modern humans evolved around 300 thousand years ago in Africa1. Modern humans started to appear in the fossil record outside of Africa about 100 thousand years ago though other hominins existed throughout Eurasia much earlier2–4. Recently, several researchers argued in favour of a single out of Africa event for modern humans based on whole-genome sequences analyses5–7. However, the single out of Africa model is in contrast with some of the findings from fossil records, which supports two out of Africa8,9, and uniparental data, which proposes back to Africa movement10,11. Here, we used a novel deep learning approach coupled with Approximate Bayesian Computation and Sequential Monte Carlo to revisit these hypotheses from the whole genome sequence perspective. Our results support the back to Africa model over other alternatives. We estimated that there are two successive splits between Africa and out of African populations happening around 60-80 thousand years ago and separated by 12-13 thousand years. One of the populations resulting from the more recent split has to a large extent replaced the older West African population while the other one has founded the out of Africa populations.

Jerusalem

This chapter focuses on Augustine, whose influence on Western Christianity cannot be overemphasized, was born in a Roman province in North Africa of a Christian mother and a pagan father. Raised a Christian, he dropped out, acquired a mistress with whom he lived for thirteen years and by whom he had a son who died in adolescence, went to Italy as a professor of rhetoric, fell among the Manicheans, sloughed off his first mistress and had another for two years. Finally, Augustine went back to Africa, particularly at the urging of his very persistent mother, became again a Christian and was baptized by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in 386. About ten years after returning to Christianity, Augustine wrote his autobiography, the Confessions, perhaps the greatest spiritual story of personal growth of Western culture. His God is emphatically the God of Plato, the God of The Republic, where the form of the good is a necessarily existing eternal force or entity, outside time and space, truly good and beautiful, the font of all other beings, from which everything stems and to which everything relates as the cause of existence.