Africana Studies Commons^™

Theology In African American Spirituals And White Protestant Hymnody: A Comparative Study, Justin Oei

Undergraduate Research Awards

"The spiritual is one of the most significant windows into the religious experiences of Black Americans. This paper will analyze the theological content of the spiritual, and 19th/20thcentury Black religious practice more broadly, alongside that of contemporary white Protestant hymnody. Fundamentally, the African American Christian experience is based around the promise of liberation from oppression by the Messiah; it seeks justice for the downtrodden and a Kingdom of God based on equity.

I posit that, through a comparative analysis of selected Black spirituals and contemporaneous white hymnody, the spiritual’s theological content will be more focused on liberation as expressed through …

“Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways For Institutionalizing Black Theater Pedagogy And Production At Historically White Universities, Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from the article: "E ku Ose Ogun! At the time of writing, it is a day to venerate the Orisa of iron, mystic vision, destruction, and creation. Ogun, the adaptable, force of will, and road-opening energy, commits to doing difficult but necessary work to bring about transformation..."

Archaeology Under The Blinding Light Of Race, Michael L. Blakey

Arts & Sciences Articles

Racism is defined as a modern system of inequity emergent in Atlantic slavery in which “Whiteness” is born and embedded. This essay describes its transformation. The operation of racist Whiteness in current archaeology and related anthropological practices is demonstrated in the denigration and exclusion of Black voices and the denial of racism and its diverse appropriations afforded the White authorial voice. The story of New York’s African Burial Ground offers a case in point.

Aesthetics Of Oya In Reading, Casting, And Staging Lillian Hellman’S The Children’S Hour, Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

In the eighteen years between the play’s opening at the Maxine Elliot Theatre and 1952, Lillian Hellman’s 1934 version of The Children’s Hour undergoes a dramaturgical evolution. As Hellman evolved as a playwright and queer woman, she revisits the play several times, altering character attributes and modifying content. In Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), Hellman describes this process of revision as pentimento writing, “later choice[s], [are] a way of seeing and then seeing again” (309). Hellman’s amendments were the inspiration for the conceptual approach used in the 2018 William & Mary Theatre production of The Children’s Hour—a framework …

On Joe And The Burial Place(S) Of The Enslaved At William & Mary, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"It is possible that in the 17th or 18th century W&M opened a burial ground on its 330 acre campus and that it buried there those it enslaved over some 172 years. We have no documentation of that, although we have several references to the College’s providing coffins.1 Since those record no further expenses such as transport to the grave or digging the grave, I presume there would have been no such expenses--other of our enslaved would undertake such tasks as part of their job..."

Who Was Albert Luthuli?, Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa’s leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns.

Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the …

“The Blood Remember Don’T It?”: The Ethnocultural Dramatic Structure Of Katori Hall’S The Blood Quilt, Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

The Yorùbá influenced Ethnocultural Dramatic Structure of Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt is an example of the enduring philosophical permanence of African aesthetics within the tradition of Black Theatre. Within The Blood Quilt is the manifestation of a Yorùbá traditional divination system and body of orature, the Odù Ifá. Hall acknowledges exploring Yorùbá cultural expressions, yet she refutes any dramaturgical intention to locate the play within the Odù Ifá. Thus, the incarnation of verses of Ifá in the text evidences her belief that a playwright’s consciousness and her work are often phenomenologically informed. This analysis argues that recognizing, understanding, and …

Dollar Diplomacy By Force: Nation-Building And Resistance In The Dominican Republic, Written By Ellen D. Tillman, Richard L. Turits

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from publication: "Ellen Tillman has produced a major monograph on the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924. In it she offers a novel account of the powerful national army that the occupying forces created there. Prior to the U.S. invasion, a centralized Dominican military existed only nominally. In the eyes of many U.S. policy makers, this created vulnerabilities for U.S. capital and strategic interests. Drawing heavily on Dominican as well as U.S. archival sources, Tillman demonstrates that remedying this with an effective national army shaped by, and loyal to, the U.S. government was the …

Derrick Bell, Brown, And The Continuing Significance Of The Interest-Convergence Principle, Jamel K. Donnor

School of Education Book Chapters

Although he spent his career as a lawyer and law school professor, Derrick Bell had a profound impact on the field of education in the area of educational equity. Among many accomplishments, Bell was the first African American to earn tenure at the Harvard Law School; he also established a new course in civil rights law and produced what has become a famous casebook: Race, Racism, and American Law. The man who could rightly be called, «The Father of Critical Race Theory,» Bell was an innovator who did things with the law that others had not thought possible. This …

Writing At The Williamsburg Bray School?, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

"I’ve become interested recently in whether writing was taught to the pupils in the Williamsburg Bray School. I had assumed all along that it was, and that the discovery of 40 some slate pencils at the Bray School Dig was confirmation of that.

I’d not been alone in my assumption about the teaching of writing, for the great majority of those interested in the Bray School have affirmed that the curriculum included writing..."

Regina Taylor's Crowns: The Overflow Of "Memories Cupped Under The Brim", Artisia Green

Arts & Sciences Articles

In crossing the cultural border between the North and the South, Yolanda, the main character in Regina Taylor’s Crowns, is sent on both a physical and metaphysical journey that symbolizes the ideology of the Kongo Cosmogram. South Carolina, Yolanda’s landing point and the play’s geographical context, bears multiple implications for the dramaturgy of Crowns. The land is saturated with memories of the African presence due to slave importation patterns within the coastal Sea Islands and low-country post–Civil War settlement by formerly enslaved people of West Africa and the Caribbean. As such Yorùbá aesthetics and theoretical ideas of the self …

Historical Overview Of Africans And African Americans In Yorktown, At The Moore House, And On Battlefield Property, 1635-1867 Colonial National Historical Park (Vol. 2), Julie Richter, Jody L. Allen

Arts & Sciences Books

The situation for African Americans in Yorktown did not improve much during the antebellum period. The possibility of being willed, sold, or mortgaged by a slaveholder remained. William Vail is one example. Vail had over thirty slaves and mongaged some or all of them at some point. When Vail died in 1834, he owned several lots in Yorktown but gave permission in his will to sell Ambrose, Caesar, Lucy, Bob, and Tom Bailey, if necessary to pay his debts. He left his wife, Louisa, William, Alfred, Molly, Carlia, Charlotte, Alice and her three children, as well as his "man Tom," …

Historical Overview Of Africans And African Americans In Yorktown, At The Moore House, And On Battlefield Property, 1635-1867 Colonial National Historical Park (Vol. 1), Julie Richter, Jody L. Allen

Arts & Sciences Books

The following report focuses on the lives and experiences of Africans and African Americans who lived and worked in Yorktown, at the Moore House, and on Battlefield Property between 1635 and 1867. The goal of this study is to highlight the role that Africans and African Americans played in Yorktown and the surrounding rural area. A wide variety of primary documents contain details about the enslaved men, women, and children who labored in the homes of Yorktown's elite residents, worked in the shops of the town's skilled artisans, and tended fields on nearby plantations. In addition, Yorktown was home to …

Introduction To "The Americans Are Coming! Dreams Of African American Liberation In Segregationist South Africa", Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

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 …

Epistemology For A Humanistic Human Biology: The Case Of The New York African Burial Ground Project At Howard University, Michael L. Blakey

Arts & Sciences Articles

"A basic respect for the meaning of culture (that human perceptions, ideas, and behaviors learned) demands us to accept that the human practice of science is thoroughly embedded in culture..."

Providential Design: American Negroes And Garveyism In South Africa, Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Transcending geographic and cultural lines, From Toussaint to Tupac is an ambitious collection of essays exploring black internationalism and its implications for a black consciousness. At its core, black internationalism is a struggle against oppression, whether manifested in slavery, colonialism, or racism. The ten essays in this volume offer a comprehensive overview of the global movements that define black internationalism, from its origins in the colonial period to the present. From Toussaint to Tupac focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the …

Historical Perspectives Of The African Burial Ground New York Blacks And The Diaspora, Edna G. Medford

Arts & Sciences Books

The unearthing of the colonial cemetery known historically as the “Negroes Burying Ground” in Lower Manhattan in 1991 has given both scholars and the general public the opportunity to study and comprehend the broad dimensions of the African American experience. The African Burial Ground and the human remains contained within it provide a unique vantage point from which to view New York City’s Africans and their descendants over two centuries. As the final resting place for thousands of enslaved and free black people who lived and labored in the city from roughly 1627 until the end of the eighteenth century, …

The Skeletal Biology Of The New York African Burial Ground (Pt. 1), Michael L. Blakey, Lesley M. Rankin-Hill

Arts & Sciences Books

The New York African Burial Ground was “rediscovered” in 1989 in the process of preparation for the construction of a proposed 34-story federal office building by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) at 290 Broadway in New York City (Ingle et al. 1990). The site for the proposed building was once part of the African Burial Ground that extended “from Chambers Street on the south to Duane Street on the north and from Centre Street on the east to Broadway on the west” (Yamin 2000:vii). A fullscale archaeological excavation was conducted by Historic Conservation and Interpretation (HCI) and John Milner …

The Archaeology Of The New York African Burial Ground (Pt. 1), Warren R. Perry, Jean Howson, Barbara A. Bianco

Arts & Sciences Books

This volume is one of three disciplinary volumes on the New York African Burial Ground Project. One volume focuses on the skeletal biological analysis of the remains recovered from the site (see Volume 1 of this series, Skeletal Biology of the New York African Burial Ground [Blakey and Rankin-Hill 2009a]). Another focuses on the documentary history, from a diasporic perspective, of Africans who lived and died in early New York (see Volume 3 of this series, Historical Perspectives of the African Burial Ground: New York Blacks and the Diaspora [Medford 2009]). The present volume, consisting of three parts, presents the …

The Skeletal Biology Of The New York African Burial Ground (Pt. 2): Burial Descriptions And Appendices, Michael L. Blakey, Lesley M. Rankin-Hill

Arts & Sciences Books

No abstract provided.

The Archaeology Of The New York African Burial Ground (Pt. 2): Descriptions Of Burials, Warren R. Perry, Jean Howson, Barbara A. Bianco

Arts & Sciences Books

No abstract provided.

The Archaeology Of The New York African Burial Ground (Pt. 3): Appendices, Warren R. Perry, Jean Howson, Barbara A. Bianco

Arts & Sciences Books

No abstract provided.

"Introduction" & "The Sacred Life Of Plants: Placing Royal Growth", Brad Weiss

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Weiss explores the dynamic relation of specific local, regional, and global understandings of value as manifested in the coffee of rural Haya communities. His investigation offers critical insight into the significance of colonial and postcolonial encounters in this region of Africa.