African American Cultural Identity Research Articles

Bonds and barriers: Mental health, service provision, and Middle Eastern/North African cultural identity in the U.S.

This exploratory study examined the intersections of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) American cultural identity and attitudes towards mental health and mental health services. Fifteen in-depth narrative interviews with participants of MENA descent in the United States were analyzed using qualitative thematic content analysis, revealing five primary themes within these data: denial, lack of awareness, stigma/shame, collective identity, and resistance. These results indicate cultural identity plays a unique and significant role in how this population understands and responds to mental health and substance use challenges, in a way that often creates barriers to social service provision and success. Implications and suggestions for how these findings might be used to develop more culturally competent and effective social work interventions for MENA communities are discussed.

Alice Walker’s Everyday Use: Decoding Cultural Inheritance and Identity

The complex notion of cultural heritage can be ascribed different connotations in the context of inheritance and identity. Cultural assets can be construed as valuable gifts handed down through generations which sustain as historic souvenirs of an ever-changing ethnic identity. This paper deliberates upon the intricacies of African-American cultural inheritance and identity in Alice Walker’s Everyday Use.

From the Sacred Sound of the Conch Shell to the Cemetery Dance: Reimagining an Africana Festival Created in a Southern Appalachian City

To contemplate African American experience and its many racialized contours is to invoke a tensive quandary concerning the reconstruction of African American cultural identity in a dynamic network of historically assailed African diasporas. Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach that deploys historical analysis as well as cross-cultural and epistemological reflection, this article gestures in such a reconstructive direction from the local vantage point of Asheville, North Carolina’s “African and Caribbean” Goombay Festival. One detects in the festival an exotifying, ambiguously celebratory quality that deprioritizes Affrilachian cultural memory in southern Appalachia in favor of consumable public entertainment. The ensuing argument culminates in a preliminary epistemological reimagining of the Asheville Goombay Festival by way of constructive intercourse with the ancestral spirit-based African Jamaican ritual institution of Gumbay Play, an institution that facilitates processes of identity formation through mnemonically engaged ritual performance. Further, it is argued that this reimagining can amplify the ancestral mnemonic potential of Goombay in Asheville to incorporate more fully the varied Affrilachian lifeworlds of western North Carolina, thereby making possible a reexamination of African American cultural identity in Asheville capable of producing substantive responses to the epistemological challenge of Affrilachian cultural identity formation within western North Carolina’s greater social landscape.

Meeting at Market: The Intersection of African American Culture, Craft, and Economy and the Landscape of Charleston, South Carolina

Markets were integral to the development of Charleston’s urban landscape, and the interaction between African Americans and market spaces shaped Charleston. The archaeology of the South Carolina low country highlights African Americans’ role in Charleston’s market economy and the significance of this economy in forging an African American cultural identity, the Gullah. The linkage between markets and African American space in Charleston persists, and these connections indicate that markets and the market economy have deep-seated meanings to the Gullah.

The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Jill Bergman (review)

Bergman, Jill. 2012. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. $38.95 hc. 206 pp.Jill Bergman illuminates the trope of motherlessness in African-American using Pauline Hopkins's novels as an exemplary case. While this pattern has received a dearth of scholarly attention, she considers it to be substantial enough to constitute a literary tradition. Bergman argues that the absence of and longing for the mother-both the individual and the African motherland-figures so prominently in what she motherless child literature because it reflects the lived experience of motherlessness that has historically characterized the African-American community. This condition reaches back to the rise of the slave trade in the early seventeenth century and extends into the post-Reconstruction era, the period in which Hopkins wrote her novels and the focus of Bergman's study. She argues that representations of motherlessness in African-American literary texts can address the individual and the community, the personal and the political, because mother figures as both the personal and the National Mother, a term she develops to capture the idealized notion of African heritage as a source of national belonging (28).Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Bergman constructs a useful framework not only for examining literary representations of motherlessness, but also for conceptualizing the trauma experienced by the African-American community and its lingering consequences. She reworks Freud's Oedipal model, in which rejection of the and identification with the father is a crucial phase in the development of the ego. In Bergman's rewriting of the Freudian narrative, the African-American community is the subject, African heritage and the idealized nation of Africa are the Mother, and dominant white US culture is the Father. Recognizing that its stands in a marginalized position in relation to the Father, Bergman writes, the subject comes to understand that it must reject this powerless in order to be successfully articulated as a rights-bearing citizen (18). However, this process is fraught with contradictions because both separation from the and identification with the Father are simultaneously prohibited and required. The Father mandates separation from the Mother, but African Americans under the institution of slavery inherit their position of marginalization from their biological mothers. By the same token, while identification with the Father is necessitated, it is also precluded because of institutionalized racism that calls for the exclusion of African Americans from citizenship based on their identification with the African National Mother (97). According to Bergman, these contradictions leave African Americans in a state of limbo marked by (22), a sense of loss without being able to identify the lost object, a condition of which she finds ample evidence in Hopkins's novels.In order to address the national register of the African-American subject's experience, Bergman employs postcolonial studies, namely through the work of Stuart Hall and Frantz Fanon. She associates the experience of the African- American subject with that of the colonized subject in that its history has been subjected to extensive distortion and destruction. Reclaiming that history, Bergman reasons, can have the effect of restoring African-American cultural identity, a process that she finds to be particularly apparent in Hopkins's novels. Indeed, if the loss of the and the Father's intrusion upon the pre-Oedipal Mother-child bond induces racial melancholia, Bergman shows how this melancholia becomes productive in Hopkins's work because it can lead to individual and communal healing. For instance, she cogently reveals how music functions in the novels to provide characters access to cultural roots and to resuscitate memories of suffering inflicted by slavery. …

Two Strikes and the Double Negative: The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Cases of Female Jazz Saxophonists

On January 1,2012,1 was invited to a party at my friend's house in Brooklyn, New York, where about ten jazz musicians gathered and celebrated the New Year over food and drinks. They knew me both as a jazz saxophonist who worked from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and as a researcher who conducted fieldwork in the late 2000s in New York City. Some of them helped me to connect with female jazz saxophonists to interview for my dissertation research. After talking about my research and several female saxophonists' remarkable success in recent years, a white male (and friend) mentioned, You know, white guys are the least favored in the scene. Yes, that's very true, another white male immediately responded. According to those two men, black musicians are more appreciated and female musicians attract more attention. In a similar way, one of my musician friends in Pittsburgh told me recently, You're a hot commodity because you're a woman sax player. I'm a white guy, nobody cares. These white male musicians' comments suggest that two different systems of preference are at work here: black musicians over white musicians because of authenticity, and female musicians over male musicians because of novelty. As a result, they perceive a certain hierarchy in the jazz scene: black men, black women, white (nonblack) women, and white (nonblack) men. This grading, whether valid or not, is different from the ones seen in many areas in American society where white males are often ranked the highest. More importantly, their comments demonstrate that the instrumental jazz scene is a site where both gender and race merge in complex dialogues that involve authenticity, belonging, and career advancement. This article explores how such issues, surrounding gender and race, intersect in the experiences of female jazz saxophonists. Based on interviews with female jazz saxophonists who are active in New York City, I draw attention to how African-American cultural identity affects female saxophonists' employment and the way they perform gender in the context of jazz. Specifically, I examine the meanings of these racial and cultural issues for African-American and non-African-American women who play jazz. How do these women talk about these issues in the context of their lives as performers? Why are there so few African-American female jazz instrumentalists in the current jazz scene? These questions and interviews frame this study, which shows the complexity of how African-American and white women experience jazz and demonstrates how gender issues in jazz can be shaped by race, especially various notions about blackness. The first part of the article focuses on issues of authenticity and jazz performance, especially as viewed by white female saxophonists, both American and European. The second part addresses practical, employment matters, chiefly the roles race and gender play in the employment of white female musicians and their interactions with male musicians. The third and fourth sections draw attention to the views of African-American women on similar subjects as previously mentioned and explores issues surrounding the scarcity of African-American female instrumentalists. My ideas of gender and race, as well as the use of intersectionality as an analytical framework, should be explained further. I subscribe to Stuart Hall's definition of cultural identity that consists of two seemingly opposing views: a fixed, unchanging, cultural essence, yet not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture but rather constantly undergoes transformation (Hall 1989, 69-70). In his discussion of Afro-Caribbean cinema, Hall posits that cultural identity belongs to the future as much as to the past (Hall 1989,69-70). I also draw on Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity; I consider categories of identity performative (Butler 1990). In other words, there is no essential quality for any identity category. …

Lift every voice and sing: Constructing community through culturally relevant pedagogy in the University of Illinois Black Chorus

For Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally relevant pedagogy is characterized by three criteria: academic success, cultural competence and critical consciousness. Those engaged in culturally relevant pedagogy are connected by how they see themselves as teachers and how they see their students, how they view knowledge and how they structure social relations in their classroom. These threads are all evident in the University of Illinois' Black Chorus practice. This article shows how conductor Dr Ollie Watts Davis' culturally relevant practices with the choir generate and sustain a unique community with strong social bonds that in turn create and reinforce musical excellence, inspiring the singers to do better, live better and sing better while embracing their African American cultural heritage and identity.

Role of W.E.B Du Bois in the Afro-American Cultural Politics and the Harlem Renaissance

The paper illustrates the cultural politics involving the African-American community that witnessed movements during various stages starting from the late 18th century and culminating in the 20th century. There was an amalgamation of various social, cultural and to some extent political initiatives led by various African-American intellectuals and civil activists for the elevation and emancipation of the Afro-American community and for the reclamation of the civil rights and equality for blacks in the American society. One of these intellectuals, Du Bois played an important role in furthering the cause of African-African community and giving them their rightful place in the highly divided country bruised by the Civil War.The African-American Liberation Movement focused on assimilation of blacks into the urban American society after a ghettoization of areas in the North following mass migrations of African-Americans from the South. Political activism by Du Bois and other persons such as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington and others sought recognition of African roots in their mixed African-American heritage and fostering of realization of pride in their roots, rich and distinctive cultural heritage and also uniting them while remaining moderate. At the same time he fought against social ills such as racial discrimination and segregation and being himself a supporter of higher education for black community, he wrote extensively on a variety of themes ranging from family to religion and so forth. Various organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) canalized the ideological discourses.The Harlem Renaissance characterized change and enhancement of music as well as political and ideological writing. These events are of paramount importance while looking at the shaping of African-American cultural identity.

Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August Wilson's 10-Play Cycle

In various interviews, August Wilson admitted that a "special relationship" exists between his so-called bookend plays: Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) and Radio Golf (set in 1997). In writing both, his mission was to ". . . build an umbrella under which the rest of the plays can sit . . . a bridge. The subject matter of these two plays is going to be very similar and connected thematically," he explained further, "meaning that the other eight will be part and parcel of these two. You should be able to see how they all fit inside these last two plays." This essay entitled "Framing African American Cultural Identity: The Bookends Plays in August Wilson's 10-Play Cycle" examines the intertextual relationships within and among five of August Wilson's cycle plays while paying close attention to two of Wilson's plays that are strategically positioned at the beginning and end of a ninety-six-year time line.

“Put a Little Color on That!”

Drawing on more than five years of extended fieldwork, this article explores the tropes through which dancers express and explain their participation in the Lindy Hop revival. In this reconstruction, the author extends Bourdieu's notions of symbolic power, symbolic violence, and misrecognition to show how racial domination is produced and perpetuated, denigrating and erasing African American cultural identity. As a result, the discourses of the Lindy Hop revival provide a window into understanding how the dominant racial logic of American society circulates even in the most apparently innocuous of cultural practices.

Postmodernism, Pop Music, and Blues Practice in Nelson George's Post-Soul Culture

[T]here is something missing in black America, and symptoms of the illness are in its music. (Nelson George, Death of Rhythm and Blues xii). We are no longer post-soul. We are something else. For now, I leave that new definition to you (Nelson George, Post-Soul Nation 230) In a period lasting about 20 years from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, author and music producer Nelson George published a series of books that examine African American cultural identity, popular music, and social change. This compelling series of books includes Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound (1985); The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988); Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1992); Hip Hop America (1999); and Post-Soul Nation (2003). (1) These texts examine company histories, stylistics, and noteworthy recordings among several recent genres of black popular music, with a special interest in business models, artist/producer collaborations, and other practices and innovations that have made particular genres, artists, and companies succeed and fail. The texts also probe how black music styles have influenced music consumers and public culture during an era beginning with the rise of rhythm and blues and ending with the globalization of hip hop as a musical lingua franca among world youth. More specifically, George's texts hypothesize ways that black popular music produces a collective black cultural identity by responding to social conditions and justice-seeking movements among African Americans. Collectively, the texts raise a number of questions regarding popular music, identity politics, and social change going forward into the twenty-first century: can the multidisciplinary discourse known as postmodernism be used to point the way from traditional identity politics and racial essentialism to more rigorous and scientifically sound understandings of race, popular music, and cultural change? What assumptions and methods are most useful for examining the relationship between African American cultural identities and black popular music? In future decades, should one expect that black popular music will serve as a leading force toward progressive social change, as it appeared to do during the periods when jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and soul music emerged? Working from George's texts and a postmodernist/new historicist lens, my essay examines culture within a wider postmodernist critique of black cultural essentialism. Like George, I am interested in how popular music responds to and represents the collective cultural experiences of African Americans, and I am especially interested in the representational qualities of hip hop and blues music in the postmodern moment. I find hip hop to be an exciting subject of study because it is currently practiced widely with significant stylistic variety and a high degree of consumer and critical interest; hip hop is widely presumed, in fact, to be the musical style with the most current relevance to everyday African American life. Blues, on the other hand, is widely thought to be anachronistic as black cultural expression--once a genre engaging strong consumer and critical interest, now a subject of greater interest to committed aficionados and musicologists than ordinary music consumers or even cultural critics such as George. I do join George, though, in wondering what it means for the vitality of African American cultural expression and critical discourse to leave behind the traditions and institutions that produced classic rhythm and blues, soul, and blues, with shifting identity politics and declining black consumer interest in the blues being of heightened interest in my own critical reading of post-soul culture. Indeed, I am glad to engage with George and others in an effort to identify where and how black popular music has brought critical insights on race, culture, and politics to a wider public--and where and how black popular music has had a less constructive role. …

Parental Cultural Perspectives in Relation to Weight‐Related Behaviors and Concerns of African‐American Girls

To determine whether cultural perspectives of parents may influence children's eating and physical activity behaviors and patterns of weight gain. African-American girls (ages 8 to 10 years) and their parents (or caregivers) (n = 210) participated at one of four Girls Health Enrichment Multisite Studies Phase 1 Field Centers. At baseline, parents completed questionnaires adapted from the African-American Acculturation Scale (AAAS), the Multiethnic Identity Scale (MEIS), and an original question on Global Cultural Identity. Girls' baseline measures included physical activity assessment by accelerometer, 24-hour dietary recalls, and questionnaires about body image and weight concerns. Principal components analysis indicated the expected AAAS and MEIS factor structures, with moderate to good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.61 to 0.82) and some intercorrelation among these measures (r = 0.17 to 0.57). Overall mean (SD) AAAS subscale scores of 4.1 (2.1) and 5.5 (1.8) of a possible 7 and 3.0 (0.9) of a possible 4 on the MEIS indicated, respectively, moderate to high levels of parental African-American cultural orientation and identity with moderate variability. Parental AAAS and MEIS scores were inversely correlated with girls' body image discrepancy and weight concern. One AAAS subscale was positively associated with total energy intake and percentage energy from fat. Overall, however, parental AAAS and MEIS scores were unrelated or inconsistently related to girls' physical activity and diet measures. The AAAS and MEIS measures had acceptable psychometric properties, except for weight concern, but did not give a consistent picture of how parental perspectives related to the girls' baseline attitudes and behaviors.

Racial identity and the MMPI in African American male college students.

The relation of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to the Racial Identity Attitude Scale--Black, Short Form (RIAS-B) was examined among 50 African American male college students in a reanalysis of unpublished MMPI data described in R. H. Dana (1993). This permitted study of relationships between MMPI scores and specific psychological variables hypothesized to produce cultural differences among African Americans. Results indicated RIAS-B scale scores functioned as predictors of MMPI scale scores. Similar research with the MMPI-2 incorporating larger samples that more adequately represent African American heterogeneity is needed. Methodological implications of these findings for MMPI-2 research with ethnic and racial groups are discussed, emphasizing the importance of research to depathologize African American racial and cultural identity.

Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

published in the 1979 collection, Sturdy Black Bridges. Southerland's article makes an important contribution to readings of Hurston's integration of folklore and fiction. The essay discusses the appearance and significance of various signs, symbols and rituals in Hurston's fiction; and more specific to this paper, it identifies the use of Vodou symbolism in Their Eyes Were Watching God very early in the history of the novel's criticism. But Southerland does not cite her sources for certain voodoo rituals, or for the significance of various numbers and colors which appear repeatedly in Hurston's fiction. Her analysis therefore seems based on anecdotal evidence and it ignores the cultural distinctions amongst Haitian, Louisiana and other kinds of voodoo and hoodoo. These aspects of the essay contribute to the failure, or refusal, of succeeding generations of literary critics to further examine the cultural influences that Southerland found in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Some-although certainly not all-critics have categorized Hurston's study and incorporation of Vodou as an intriguing curiosity, perhaps considering it to fall within the purview of anthropology and not literature. Reading the novel within such narrow parameters, however, has resulted in a general inability on the part of Hurston's readers to identify the extent to which her use of Vodou ethnography in her literature enables her exploration of female empowerment and African-American cultural identity. In this paper, I focus specifically on Hurston's use of Haitian Vodou imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I argue that the folklore enables her confrontation of various kinds of social and personal transformation. Her use of Vodou imagery enables her to analyze the relationship among migration, culture and identity that lies

Acknowledging ambivalence: The creation of communal memory in the writing of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison exclaimed to Paul Gilroy in 1993 'Just as long as they don't call me a magic realist, as though I don't have a culture to write out of'. This comment reveals an underlying anxiety in Morrison's work concerning the indefinite characteristics of African American cultural identity. Morrison seeks to address this insecurity by creating an African American cultural memory with her readership through mutual acts of the imagination. In order to achieve this her writing encourages the imaginative participation of the reader in the text through oral storytelling techniques and, despite Morrison's disclaimer, through magic realist devices.

The Archaeology of Slavery in North America

Archaeologists began to study slavery more than two decades ago, and since that time this interest has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular research specialties in the archaeology of the post-Columbian period. This essay reviews the interpretation of the archaeological record of slavery directed toward the analysis of four themes: living conditions under slavery, status differences within the plantation community, relationships of planter dominance and slave resistance, and formation of African-American cultural identity. It also discusses the sociopolitical context within which this study has operated and strongly recommends that greater efforts be taken to include African-American perspectives to inform this research.

The Archaeology of Slavery in North America

Archaeologists began to study slavery more than two decades ago, and since that time this interest has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular research specialties in the archaeology of the post-Columbian period. This essay reviews the interpretation of the archaeological record of slavery directed toward the analysis of four themes: living conditions under slavery, status differences within the plantation community, relationships of planter dominance and slave resistance, and formation of African-American cultural identity. It also discusses the sociopolitical context within which this study has operated and strongly recommends that greater efforts be taken to include African-American perspectives to inform this research.

Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision--Canonization and Humanity

In an interview in the journal Callaloo, Yusef Komunyakaa, author of seven collections of poems, expresses his admiration for poets whom he considers to have achieved a in their poetry, an achievement he apparently strives for in his own work. A closely associated, if not identical, goal and a source of tension in Komunyakaa's poetry is his desire to gain admittance into the American literary canon, but not at the expense of surrendering his African American cultural identity. At the core of Komunyakaa's pursuit of a unified vision and literary canonization is his stern resistance, textualized formalistically as well as thematically in his poems, to those forces in the hegemonous counterculture aimed at excluding him as an African American from the ranks of humanity. Indeed, in the singularity of his perseverance and in both the high quality and quantity of his poetic output, Komunyakaa approaches the intensity of no less a figure than prototypical canonization quester Ralph Ellison in his bid for mainstream American literary status. Komunyakaa, however, lacks the irritability Ellison sometimes displays in his attitude toward other African American writers, in particular the young black writers of the culturally insurrectionary 1970s. unified vision Komunyakaa seeks involves the integration and aesthetic instillation in his poetry of cultural material from both his African American and his European American sources. A useful sampling of Komunyakaa's artistry at work - including his quest for a unified vision, his bid for literary canonization, and his push for the completion of his humanity - can be found in two poems from his ironically titled fourth collection, for the Eyes in Head (1986): When in Rome - Apologia, the last two lines of which supply the title of the book, and I Apologize. will also refer briefly to The Music That Hurts. A particularly illustrative passage appears in I Apologize, a dramatic monologue that intertextualizes Robert Browning's prototypical dramatic monologue My Last Duchess: I'm just like the rest of the world: / No comment; no way, Jose (37). After staking his claim for unqualified status in the human race and issuing his somewhat tongue-in-cheek declaration of no comment (ironically noting the extent to which further comment might implicate him in the negatives as well as the positives of the humanity he holds in common with his white auditor), the persona comments anyway, Addressing the person designated as sir, who occupies the position of the implicit, silent auditor of the traditional dramatic monologue, the persona observes that he want[s] spring always / dancing with the pepper trees, etc. (37). Like most of Komunyakaa's poems, I Apologize is markedly obscure. On first reading, the persona might be the typical, racially or ethnically unspecifiecl, Peeping Tom, but we soon realize that he is the archetypal reckless eyeballer, the fated African American male in the U.S. South of not too many years ago who is accused of looking, too long, and by implication with sexual intent, at some white woman, a tabooistic infrigement for which he is likely to be lynched. accused's only defense, his only recourse in such a predicament, is a desperate and futile excuse. is typified in the poem's opening lines, which also encapsulate the kind of redemptive humor black people engage in among themselves: My mind wasn't even there. / Mirage, sir. didn't see / what thought saw. / ... was miles away, saw nothing! (37). Then there is the sheer desperation of the poem's concluding line and a half - This morning / can't even remember who am (37) - an apparent plea of insanity. When in Rome - Apologia aptly intertextualizes Browning's monologue as well. Both of Komunyakaa's poems allude to the fate of the wife of Browning's jealous persona, the Duke who had his spouse killed for smiling excessively at other men. …

Education and Schooling

Within a society schooling and education cannot be conceptualized as overlapping processes when unequal power relations exist among groups with differing cultural orientations. In this article, the author argues that the strategic differentiation between education and schooling is fundamental to the maintenance and development of an African-American cultural orientation and identity. He contends that education and schooling are different processes and that, although it is possible for them to overlap, it is also probable that most African-Americans receive more schooling than education. He presents a conceptual model that links the process of schooling to the perpetuation of existing relations of power and politically dominant culture in the United States.

Signifyin(g) on African-American Theatre: "The Colored Museum" by George Wolfe

How should African Americans confront their legacy, their heritage of struggle and survival? Heralded after its 1986 Off-Broadway debut as a bold new voice in black theatre' The Colored Museum ponders this critical question. Playwright George C. Wolfe wraps his answer in contradiction and paradox, as The Colored Museum simultaneously celebrates, satirizes and subverts the African-American legacy. Wolfe calls his play both, an exorcism and a party.2 The Colored Museum explores contemporary African-American cultural identity, while, at the same time revisiting and reexamining the African-American theatrical and cultural past. According to Wolfe the legacy of the past must be both embraced and overcome.