African Americans and Africa

African Americans and Africa PDF Author: Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244916
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
An introduction to the complex relationship between African Americans and the African continent What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? Rising immigration levels, globalization, and the United States’ first African American president have all sparked new dialogue around the question. This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.

The Americans Are Coming!

The Americans Are Coming! PDF Author: Robert Trent Vinson
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators. Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish “Africa for Africans,” liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle. The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.

Creating Africa in America

Creating Africa in America PDF Author: Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204263
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
With a booming economy that afforded numerous opportunities for immigrants throughout the 1990s, the Twin Cities area has attracted people of African descent from throughout the United States and the world and is fast becoming a transnational metropolis. Minnesota's largest urban area, the region now also has the country's most diverse black population. A closely drawn ethnography, Creating Africa in America: Translocal Identity in an Emerging World City seeks to understand and evaluate the process of identity formation in the context of globalization in a way that is also site specific. Bringing to this study a rich and interesting professional history and expertise, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson focuses on a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, the Cultural Wellness Center, which combines different ethnic approaches to bodily health and community well-being as the basis for a shared, translocal "African" culture. The book explores how the body can become a surrogate locus for identity, thus displacing territory as the key referent for organizing and experiencing African diasporan diversity. Showing how alternatives are created to mainstream majority and Afrocentric approaches to identity, she addresses the way that bridges can be built in the African diaspora among different African immigrant, African American, and other groups. As this thoughtful and compassionate ethnographic study shows, the fact that there is no simple and concrete way to define how one can be African in contemporary America reflects the tangled nature of cultural processes and social relations at large. Copeland-Carson demonstrates the cultural creativity and social dexterity of people living in an urban setting, and suggests that anthropologists give more attention to the role of the nonprofit sector as a forum for creating community and identity throughout African diasporan history in the United States.

Africa Speaks, America Answers

Africa Speaks, America Answers PDF Author: Robin D. G. Kelley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

Extracting Profit

Extracting Profit PDF Author: Lee Wengraf
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608468763
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Extracting profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. This period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs but has instead fueled the growth of the extraction of natural resources and an increasingly-wealthy African ruling class.

Middle Passages

Middle Passages PDF Author: James T. Campbell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440649413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

African Roots/American Cultures

African Roots/American Cultures PDF Author: Sheila S. Walker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742501652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This multidisciplinary volume highlights the African presence throughout the Americas, and African and African Diasporan contributions to the material and cultural life of all of the Americas, and of all Americans. It includes articles from leading scholars and from cultural leaders from both well-known and little-known African Diasporan communities. Privileging African Diasporan voices, it offers new perspectives, data, and interpretations that challenge prevailing understandings of the Americas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

From America to a New Africa

From America to a New Africa PDF Author: Jamal Abraham
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1984585096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
This book examines the potential statehood status of Black Americans in a post Obama period. It presents the condition that Black Americans find themselves from an engineering scientist perspective. Plausible alternative solutions for Black Americans are carefully critiqued with a rational narrowing process. A new option is put on the table that has to do with founding of a new organization known as International African American Workforce. This initiative, IAAW, represents an American workforce made up largely of Black Americans that have nation building skills conducive to engaging in large industrial projects. The IAAW Administration translates need of select African countries into an Industrial upgrade-for-Land project. Types of Industrial upgrades the company would administer in host African countries include: 1. Vocational Institutes 2. Manufacturing and assembly plant upgrades 3. Advanced Irrigation Systems 4. Process Plant Upgrades 5. Middle school to High school Upgrades 6. Electrical Power grid Upgrades African countries motivated to be a global competitor in the world economies of tomorrow stand to benefit from projects led by IAAW organization in Africa. These Black Americans, part of a group of 144,000, would bring a host of technical skills and know how to the country. Black Americans and a mix of other races in America are encouraged to join IAAW as the effects of Covid 19 and social racism cause further tension almost to the brinks of war.

Back to Africa

Back to Africa PDF Author: Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027104571X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description


Out Of America

Out Of America PDF Author: Keith B Richburg
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465021018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Keith B. Richburg was an experienced and respected reporter who had paid his dues covering urban neighborhoods in Washington D.C., and won praise for his coverage of Southeast Asia. But nothing prepared him for the personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was assigned to cover Africa. In this powerful book, Richburg takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa. He shows how he came to terms with the divide within himself: between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity. Are these really my people? Am I truly an African-American? The answer, Richburg finds, after much soul-searching, is that no, he is not an African, but an American first and foremost. To those who romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets that this is not the reality. He has been there and witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, and the horror. "Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive," he concludes. "Thank God I am an American."