Africana Studies Commons^™

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …

Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses Of African And Oceanic Art, 1905-8, Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Fauve painters “discovered” African and Oceanic sculpture beginning in 1905. From that time, Vlaminck first collected African art; Derain studied Oceanic works at the British Museum in spring 1906; and Matisse struggled to paint a Kongo-Vili statuette he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural works suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called “primitive” material culture. Nevertheless, the dominant conceptual framework of “primitivism” has tended to limit art-historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned here by investigating the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.

Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female …

Agency And Afro-Pessimism: Richard Wright And Ayi Kwei Armah, Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah

Honors Scholar Theses

Various scholars in Ethnic Studies have made the claim that people of color in the United States have constituted a colony within. That is to say, by virtue of the effects of institutional racism racialized bodies in the United States have experienced a form of colonialism unique to the American context. Examining the connections between forms of subjectivity in the United States and in Africa, this paper attempts to extend the concepts “social life” and “social death” to the literature of continental Africa. Through a close reading of Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” and Richard …

An Introduction To African-Centered Sociology: Worldview, Methodology And Social Theory, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

Current advances in Africana (Black) Studies utilize an African-centered conceptual framework in the study of Africana life, history, and culture. This conceptual framework has been utilized and expanded on by those developing scholarship in the sub-discipline areas of Africana Studies, including African-centered psychology, history, and literature. However, to date the articulation of an African-centered sociology, grounded in an African-centered conceptual framework, has not developed; neither has it occurred for African-centered sociology as a sub-discipline of Africana Studies, a sub-discipline of traditional sociology, or as a stand-alone discipline, itself. After a review of the worldview concept and framework and an analysis …

On The Impossibilities Of A Post-Racist America In The Obama Era, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

This chapter interrogates the reality of racism and white supremacy in what some today refer to as “the Obama era” and what others regard as evidence of a “post-racist America.” By utilizing an African-centered conceptual framework, centering on culture and worldview, this discourse constitutes a critical examination of the impossibilities of a post-racist America by investigating the lived experiences of African-descended people and other communities of color. Through this analysis, it will be evident that while we may be in “the Obama era,” we are far from a post-racist society. Thus, discussions of post-racism are assessed as conceptual masks used …

Teaching And Pedagogy In Africana Studies: Implications Of An African Worldview, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

The African worldview has informed much of the African centered scholarship produced within contemporary Africana/Black Studies. In doing so, the African worldview has functioned as the methodological foundation for the production, interpretation and dissemination of knowledge related to people of African ancestry. Africana Studies instructors and professors can also utilize the philosophical assumptions that inform the African worldview to create and recreate dynamic, culturally centered teaching practices. Given the central role of teaching at the undergraduate level within the discipline of Africana Studies it is crucial that instructors and professors concentrate on the development of discipline-specific pedagogical practices. This essay …

Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

\African-Centered Psychology, Education And The Liberation Of African Minds: Notes On The Psycho-Cultural Justification For Reparations, Karanja Keita Carroll, Dereef F. Jamison

Publications and Research

One means through which reparations can be provided to communities of African descent within America is through the creation and institutionalization of culturally enriching after-school programming, African-centered Saturday schools and independent Black educational institutions. Rather than looking to reparations as merely financial compensation for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, we can look to reparations as they relate to the building of educational infrastructures that will impact future generations of African descendants in America. This essay outlines the psychological and epistemological consequences of miseducation that many students of African descent experience within the Eurocentrically orientated education institutions they attend; The …

A History Of Art In Africa, Monica Blackmun Visonà, Robin Poynor, Herbert M. Cole

Art and Visual Studies Textbook Gallery

This is an adapted version of the second edition of A History of Art in Africa, published in 2008 by Pearson/Prentice Hall. It has been scanned and digitized with the original graphics and illustrations redacted for Monica Blackmun Visonà, who now holds copyright to the entire text. The text is complete, and chapters 1-5 include thumbnails with weblinks to alternate illustrations. Dr. Visonà is preparing a third edition of A History of Art in Africa for University of Michigan Publishing Services, which will appear both online and in print. As this textbook remains the most comprehensive art historical survey of …

Issue 06, Cariso! Summer 2006, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: "More Than A Bandmaster: The Life and Times of Alton Augustus Sr., a Cultural Odyssey", CBMR Ends Tenure in the Virgin Islands", "Performance Forum on St. Croix Music and Dance Traditions", "Thanks from St. Lucia", "Come with Me and Let's Talk about Caribbean Quadrilles". Issue 6, Summer, 2006.

Issue 05, Cariso! Winter 2006, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: "Adams Institute is Repository, Distributor for Alan Lomas's 1962 Caribbean Fieldwork", "Alan Lomax's Caribbean Voyage: Nevis Historical and Conservation Society Received 1962 Recordings Made in St. Kitts and Nevis", "St. Thomas-Born Composer Presents Score of "Virgin Islands Christmas" to AMRI", "Students Learn V.I. Music from Master Musicians", "Cuban Abakua Society Is Derived from Calabari Region of Nigeria", "The …

“Sons Of Adam”: Text, Context, And The Early Modern African Subject, Herman L. Bennett

Publications and Research

Seeking to dislodge the prism that a singular political practice—represented as the story from savage to slave—informed the slave trade, this essay points to a distinct genealogy shaping the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans.

Issue 04, Cariso!Summer 2005, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: "Performance Forum on VI Music and Dance Traditions", "CBMR Rockefeller Resident Fellows for 2005-06", "March 2005 Lecture and Summit", "AMRI Holds First Workshop for Teachers", "Family of the 'Duke of Iron' Donates Instrument to the People of the Virgin Islands", "Upcoming AMRI Events", "Brown Girl in the Ring and Other Game Songs of the U.S. Virgin Islands", "Stanley …

Issue 03, Cariso! Winter 2005, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: ""Christmas with the Ancestors: Jonkonnu and Related Festivities in Jamaica", "New AMRI Hours", "St. John People Love and Honor Their Elder Musicians", "Support from VICA", "St. Croix Colloquium" , "Rockefeller Fellow Dr. Kennth Bilby Lectures on Jonkonnu", "Teaching the Music of Alton Adams", "Tra-la-la-la-la: Music in the U.S. Virgin Islands", "The 2004=05 Rockefeller Fellows". Issue 3, 12 pages.

Issue 02, Cariso! Spring 2004, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: "AMRI to Host Public Event in St. Croix", Quelbe is Official Music of the Virgin Islands", "Quelbe Past and Present", "AMRI to Host Rockefeller Fellow Colloquium in St. Croix", "The Adams Institute Becomes a Reality: The Opening Ceremony", "Cariso Chronicles: The Original Music", "Dance Competition, Tradition, and Change in the Commonwealth of Dominica", "May Lecture in St. Thomas …

Issue 01, Cariso! Summer 2003, Columbia College Chicago

Cariso! The Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute newsletter

Cariso! is the newsletter of the Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute (AMRI), which was located in the U. S. Virgin Islands and operated by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago from 1999 to 2006. Issue articles include: "Alton Augustus Adams Music Research Institute", Another Sount of the V.I. Voice: The Music of Cyril F.W. Creque", "Virgin Islands Support Is Key to AMRI Success", "The First AMRI Workshops and Summits", "Torruellas Performs in Chicago", "Notice to Prospective Contributors", "Rockfeller Resident Fellows to Study at AMRI". Issue 1, 12 pages.

George Bush Of Tumwater: Founder Of The First American Colony On Puget Sound, Darrell Millner

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

A biography of pioneer George Washington Bush is presented. A free mulatto, information on Bush's childhood and birth date are uncertain. Believed to have been raised in Pennsylvania and educated under Quaker influence, Bush was literate and worked in the cattle business before moving to Oregon with his wife and children in 1844. Bush encountered various forms of racism, but was not deterred by pioneer life and by 1850 the family farm in the Tumwater, Washington area was thriving.

A Research Note: Race, Slavery, And The Ambiguity Of Corporate Consciousness, Herman L. Bennett

Publications and Research

In 1769, as he languished in Córdoba's prison, Diego Antonio Macute seethed. He was not alone. Fifteen of his compatriots shared his sentiments as they confronted their re-enslavement. Recent events painfully reminded them that racial consciousness had limits: their maroon allies, after all, had returned them to their former masters.

An Appeal In Favor Of That Class Of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, Paul Royster (Editor)

Electronic Texts in American Studies

The roots of white supremacy lie in the institution of negro slavery. From the 15th through the 19th century, white Europeans trafficked in abducted and enslaved Africans and justified the practice with excuses that seemed somehow to reconcile the injustice with their professed Christianity. The United States was neither the first nor the last nation to abolish slavery, but its proclaimed principles of freedom and equality were made ironic by the nation’s reluctance to extend recognition to all Americans.

“Americans” is what Mrs. Child calls those fellow countrymen of African ancestry; citizenship and equality are what she proposed beyond simple …