African-descended People Research Articles

Crafting freedom: Race and social mobility among free artisans of color in Cartagena and Charleston

ABSTRACTThroughout the urban Atlantic World, skilled work proved central to the ability of free people of color to achieve economic and social mobility during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through their labor in a wide variety of artisan occupations, free people of color gained the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their skills, industriousness, and public worth. As such, free people of color used their role as artisans to gain distinct economic advantages, to cultivate relationships with prominent whites and fellow artisans of color, and to obtain a measure of social distinction. Through their labor, artisans of African descent improved their reputations and increased their bargaining power with white authorities, gaining the opportunity to claim distinctions and privileges that improved their daily lives – ones often closed to other African-descended people. Yet this effort to achieve social and economic advancement often hindered a broader racial identification, as artisans of color attempted to draw class, color, and status distinctions between themselves and the city’s popular classes of African descent. While free artisans of color sometimes succeeded in improving their place within the social order of Atlantic World societies, that success often required them to accommodate the broader logic of American racial hierarchies.

Indigenous Epistemology Explored through Yoruba Orisha Traditions in the African Diaspora

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes an Indigenous epistemology explored through Yoruba Orisha traditions in the African diaspora. It also emphasizes the discordance between Euro-American psychology and African American women’s feminism. In particular, it presents decolonial woman-centered spriritual practices and the possibilities inherent in cosmovivencia. As an example, it draws from a symposium hosted by Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) at City University of New York in February 2016, entitled Trade/itions: Trans-Atlantic Sacred Orisha Traditions. The article is intended to open dialogue about the epistemic centering of Indigneous philosophies, as well as the historical and current practices within African diaspora spiritual systems to support individual and community well-being and social activism. In addition, it addresses the preponderance of damage-centered research about African-descended and Indigenous peoples and women, in particular, in the academic psychology literature and recommends emergent methodological strategies for resistance to those approaches that reinforce colonial paradigms. Lastly, it supports the integral connection with and reliance on the natural world and all living species within Orisha traditions. These vital connections intrinsically place women practitioners at the forefront of efforts toward environmental justice.

Real Native Genius: How an Ex-slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians

Angela Pulley Hudson's Real Native Genius narrates the lives and careers of Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil, “a fascinating antebellum couple” who performed as Indians across nineteenth-century North America (p. 1). Against the backdrop of slavery and colonization, “intertwining the lives and fates of Native, European, and African-descended people,” Hudson employs Tubbee's and Ceil's intersecting biographies to illustrate both the centrality of Indian-ness to antebellum American culture, and its relationship to racial, gender, sexual, class, and religious identities (pp. 22–23). The book explores Indian-ness “as a complex of ideas and practices” in which native and nonnative people engaged (p. 10). Following more than a dozen aliases associated with her subjects, Hudson meticulously reconstructs the biographies of Tubbee and Ceil, both of whom worked hard “to shroud, to disguise, or to alter the circumstances of their lives” and identities (p. 13). Most historians know “either William McCary and Lucy Stanton or Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil but not both,” illustrating the historical erasure of connections across Mormon, Native, and African American histories (p. 175). Writing into this void, Hudson offers a detailed portrait of Tubbee's early life as Warner McCary, an enslaved child who was owned by his free black half-siblings in Natchez, Mississippi, and began performing fife and flute “to escape the literal and emotional poverty of slavery” (p. 3). Initially described as “negro” or “mulatto,” drawing on knowledge of the native South, McCary soon began performing as Okah Tubbee, “the celebrated Indian Flutist,” as one newspaper called him in 1846 (p. 69). Hudson traces Ceil's early years as a Mormon daughter, Lucile Stanton, followed by the pair's joint ventures: as minor leaders of a religious sect in the West and as Indian performers and healers in the East.

The Diasporic Journeys of Louise Little: Grassroots Garveyism, the Midwest, and Community Feminism

Abstract This article demonstrates the importance of women in leading Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at the grassroots level, the ways Garveyite women forged “community feminism,” and the understudied importance of the U.S. Midwest and Canada as key sites of diasporic protest through the life, activism, and legacy of Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Langdon Norton Little. Born in Grenada in 1900, Little stands as a major figure in twentieth-century black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the African Diaspora. Passionately committed to black self-determination and fiercely proud of African-descended people, she emerged as an important grassroots leader in the UNIA, which claimed six million members in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and Europe during the 1920s. She joined the UNIA in Montreal, Canada, after she emigrated there after World War I in search of a better life. In the coming years, Little served as an officer in the UNIA division in Omaha, Nebraska, and avidly discussed politics with Garvey when he visited the Littles’ home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1922. However, The Autobiography of Malcolm X portrays Louise Little one-dimensionally as a wretched figure, while historian Manning Marable’s biography on Malcolm X minimizes her active role in developing his political consciousness and in leading broader black freedom struggles. These prevailing narratives affirm literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies’s observation about the ways black women have been erased from scholarly analysis of the black radical tradition. Tracing the history of Louise Little provides a lens for appreciating the importance of women in leading Pan-Africanist movements, the making of community feminism at the grassroots level, and the importance of the U.S. Midwest and Canada as sites of diasporic protest.

God and Blackness: Race, Gender, and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church by Andrea C. Abrams (review)

Reviewed by: God and Blackness: Race, Gender, and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church by Andrea C. Abrams Frederick Klaits Andrea C. Abrams, God and Blackness: Race, Gender, and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 186 pp. Middle-class religious commitment has been an under-explored topic in studies of African American faith traditions. This engaging study helps to fill the gap by exploring the Afrocentric beliefs of middle-class blacks in the US who tackle problems of identity through religious practice. For members of the First Afrikan Presbyterian Church, located in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, Afrocentrism holds the promise of resolving the predicament of “double consciousness” outlined by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) by providing specific tenets that define the meanings and practices of authentic blackness. Such essentialist conceptions are complicated by heterogeneous constructions of blackness that contribute to popular ambivalence about what counts as more or less black. Abrams succeeds in demonstrating that “this tension between essentialism and heterogeneity is not a problem to be solved; rather, it is a fundamental and necessary aspect of racial identity” (9) that gives meaning and form to First Afrikan members’ religious commitments. Lucidly composed and free of polemic, God and Blackness explores “the myriad…questions blackness raises” (7) through interviews conducted with First Afrikan members, attendance at services, and readings of church leaders’ publications. While never failing to foreground informants’ voices, Abrams engages cogently with important debates in critical scholarship on blackness in the US, in particular Algernon Austin’s (2006) thesis that Afrocentrism represents a project on the part of the black middle class to uplift the black poor by changing their values. The premise of Afrocentrism that one of white racism’s worst consequences has been to injure the self-esteem of black people in America has, [End Page 331] according to Austin, contributed to assumptions that the problems of their communities might be alleviated if they were to retain African cultural values, as immigrants from Europe and Asia have ostensibly done with theirs. Abrams agrees with Austin that members of First Afrikan are invested in demonstrating the parity of what they call “African culture” with “European culture,” but finds that they were not dismissive of the culture of poor black people. Instead, they tried to use middle-class resources to improve the welfare of the black poor in suburban Atlanta by providing educational services (124). Yet on the whole, Abrams’s response to Austin’s critique takes the form less of a riposte than of a shift in focus to the numerous ways in which embracing Afrocentrism is a means of “situating the self” (43), specifically by aligning subjectivity with understandings of identity. In Chapter 1, Abrams considers the ways in which the leaders of First Afrikan draw on the “recovery projects” of Afrocentric thinkers such as Molefi Kete Asante in order to “define themselves as subjects rather than objects of history” (27). Chapter 2 presents church members’ reflections on the forms of speaking, dressing, and hairstyling that they regard as marking them authentically black, comparing the process of acquiring an Afrocentric consciousness to that of a “recently recovered amnesiac” (65) who must learn to think and act in accordance with his or her true, yet newly acquired, identity. Chapter 3, on race and religion, focuses on how members of First Afrikan frame Jesus and other biblical personages as phenotypically black. They argue that God is black in the sense that he identifies with the sufferings of black peoples, thus standing in contrast to white racist oppressors as the only legitimate object of worship. Members of First Afrikan make reference to an “ancestral memory” (91) that denotes a collective consciousness specific to the culture and history of African-descended peoples, and that may be eclipsed by an “exiled” or “enslaved” consciousness (93). In Chapter 4, Abrams proceeds to issues of class, exploring how Afrocentrism may be an element of the “black middle class tool kit” (Lacy 2007), attractive as an “authentically black African identity that can hold its own when compared to the black cultural capital associated with poorer African Americans” (119, original emphasis). Finally, in Chapter 5, Abrams...

Analysis of an African Burial Ground in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica

This article analyzes a nineteenth-century cemetery of African-heritage individuals on a coffee plantation in Jamaica. While subsurface archaeological excavations were not undertaken, a survey of the site's surface was conducted for mortuary patterns, which revealed information on the burial practices of African-descended people in nineteenth-century Jamaica. The analysis focused on documentary records, oral accounts, and especially contemporary local interpretations of the materials and plants used to create the gravescape, which provided clues as to the meanings they likely conveyed for the people who created them. The resulting burial-ground landscape and oral traditions provide insights into the relationship between the living and the dead. In addition to the use of specific material artifacts, the deliberate selection of plants also provides evidence of the importance of plants in Jamaican belief systems. Thus, the cemetery served as a site of convergence for the cultural and natural landscapes.

Manifesting Destiny

Manifesting Destiny is a work in progress by photographer Tony Gleaton. It is a historical examination of African-descended people in the greater Trans-Mississippi West, and an attempt to counter the notion that Africans in North America, both enslaved and free, owe their historical beginnings and foothold on this continent solely to the settlements along the eastern seaboard of the United States. In this article, Gleaton chronicles the interactions, failures, accomplishments, and misdeeds of people who were part of the African diaspora in California. Through photographs and accompanying text he identifies the locations of particular events and explains what transpired there.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería

Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius (review)

Reviewed by: Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius William C. Van Norman Jr. David Sartorius. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 312 pp. David Sartorius has written an important book that challenges much of the standard narrative regarding people of color in Cuba during the nineteenth century. This rich analysis sustains a compelling and nuanced argument that will reshape what we know about race in Cuba during the nineteenth century. Sartorius convincingly contends that there were significant numbers of people of African descent who were loyal to Spain, participants in an ever-shifting relationship in which Spanish leaders unevenly sought their support and rewarded their loyalty. The author uses key events of Spanish imperial and Cuban colonial history to structure the six chapters. Each begins with an event that the author uses as a lens to explicate the context, actors, motivations, and implications of each moment. This facilitates the introduction of dozens of African-descended people, slave and free, loyal and rebel, and places them at the center of Cuban colonial history. While this book has a strong narrative structure, it is also theoretically informed, as the author draws on numerous sources to show how positions of loyalty or disloyalty to the Crown of Spain affected understandings of race and the status of people of color. In a brief introduction, the author establishes for the reader his argument and methodological concerns, and summarizes the chapters. Each part balances discussion of enslaved and free African-descended Cubans, revealing the complexity of race on the island. Sartorius also works to avoid the teleological position of only tracing events and participants that led to the ending of slavery and Cuban independence. His approach is both important and well executed, allowing the reader to fully grasp the ideas of people living in an empire and the possibilities and choices that existed for them, rather than only highlighting the road taken. In discussing the first half of the nineteenth century, Sartorius contrasts differing attitudes regarding the population of color between the leadership in Spain and elites in Cuba. There were ongoing debates on the peninsula about race and citizenship, while on the island the focus was on the question of slavery. This is highlighted by the role of Cuban deputy to the Cortes, Andrés de Jáuregui, who effectively killed the abolition debate by invoking the French debates on abolition that he claimed sparked the Haitian Revolution. Two factors contributed to attenuated freedoms for most people of color in the years leading up to the Ten Years’ War. Continued debates over slavery along with significant slave rebellions, such as those associated with the mass, state-led campaign of repression known as La Escalera in 1844, created a perceived need to limit opportunities of interaction and participation for all people of color, slave and free. [End Page 229] The first important challenge to the colonial government and imperial control in Cuba came from planters who understood that slavery was deeply tied to Spanish power. Using different strategies, both Spain and the rebels were able to attract significant numbers of African-descended Cubans to their struggle. Sartorius shows how ideas of citizenship and the loyalty of many people of color resulted in freedom for many slaves who assisted Spain. The rebels, relying on a similar rhetoric of citizenship, also freed slaves who came to their cause. The Pact of Zanjón in 1878 gave way to increased freedom of association and of the press for all. People of color seized such opportunities, establishing new branches of social and political clubs and several black newspapers. The importance of associations, cabildos, and cofradías grew, but there was a cost to these new opportunities. Members of these associations felt pressed to give up “primitive” practices, conform to Spanish colonial norms, and render apolitical any public expression of a shared identity or mutual interest. This resulted in limited opportunities for dissent. During the 1880s, both discourse and political actions reflected concerns over voting rights for men of color as well as over final emancipation. Loyalist actions were complex...

To Make a Literature Black

To Make a Literature Black Kenneth W. Warren (bio) A helpful point of departure for considering the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, The Signifying Monkey twenty-five years after its publication may be Gates’s own assertion that “the most prevalent manifestation of signifying over the last four decades is to be found in the corpus of hip-hop music. You might say hip-hop is signifying on steroids” (xxix). That hip-hop has become a worldwide musical phenomenon is beyond dispute. That Gates’s testimony (which he mentions proudly in the new introduction) in the 1990 trial in which the rap group 2 Live Crew was acquitted on charges of obscenity for its sexually explicit lyrics played any significant role in rap’s commercial success is perhaps plausible if somewhat harder to credit. Yet for Gates the concomitant rise of rap and hip-hop and his own career may constitute the most notable legacy of his work. Of course, Gates’s view on this point does not necessarily entail that we also conclude that The Signifying Monkey has been inconsequential for the study of early American literature (and one could, on this point, total up citations to that work in journals and monographs on the period). Yet whatever picture we might paint statistically or otherwise of the book’s influence on the scholarship of the period, it is clear that in thinking about his book Gates remains enamored of the idea that each historical moment of expression by African-descended peoples constitutes a “part of the never-ending intertextual conversation that’s been going on in the black tradition at least since Esu-Elegbara came to embody indeterminacy in the African tradition” (xxxii). The point is that when we read texts by black writers we hear the present in the past and the past in the present. As Gates elaborates: Texts written over two centuries ago address what we might think of as common subjects of condition that continue to be strangely resonant, and relevant, as we approach the twenty-first century. Just as there are remarkably few literary traditions whose first century’s existence is determined by texts created by slaves, so too are there few traditions that [End Page 843] claim such an apparent unity from a fundamental political condition represented for over two hundred years in such strikingly similar patterns and details. (140) Yet against Gates’s attempt to pull the study of early American literature into the currents of an ongoing black tradition there arose during this same period notions of the Atlantic world and the Black Atlantic more committed to historical periodization and discontinuity than to the telos of nationhood or peoplehood. If for Gates, under the sway of the signifying monkey as a trope, the experience of engaging with black writers in the eighteenth century and hip-hop performances in the early twentieth is finding the familiar in the distant and making aural and sonic connections across time and space, for other historically minded scholars, as I wrote some years ago in a reflective piece on the notion of the black Atlantic (“Taking the Measure”), the goal has been to bring into view a world peopled with black men and women whose horizons of expectation and being—and whose notions of literariness—diverge significantly from our own. Initially for historians of the period, and increasingly for early Americanist literary scholars, the Atlantic world was seen as indicating a spatial-temporal moment rather than a transhistorical sensibility. Of course, one cannot invoke the term Black Atlantic without bringing into the discussion Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which was published four years after The Signifying Monkey and announced as, among other things, an attempt to decenter the United States from the study of black culture and intellectual history. For Gilroy, the transatlantic life itineraries of black writers from Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley forward to the twentieth century, which included transatlantic crossings between the Americas, Europe, and Africa, attested to the extranational character of black expression beginning with the Enlightenment. And it was this international aspect of black literary production that Gilroy believed US-centered scholarship had...

Racial Economies of Academia: Africana Studies as Arbiter

Recent scholarship that suggests the continuity of assaults on the Black body is often articulated from academic spaces. This should neither surprise nor comfort us. Whereas the academy has been an intellectual space which has been complicit in the physical and intellectual justifications of nonwhite inferiority, it has also emerged as the space where it is now en vogue to question the normative valuations of whiteness. But, has anything changed? Are there any contradictions in such an ordering of knowledge? This paper examines how the original understandings of Blackness have been filtered into the ways of approaching and understanding African-descended people in the contemporary, neoliberal academy. Whether through the constructions of ethnic studies, the opening of the social sciences and humanities, or the development of liberal approaches to race within university administrative practices, it questions whether or not the academy has abdicated its role as a third pillar of racial capitalism.

Black Catholicism

Black Catholicism

The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas

Manuel Barcia has produced an important contribution to the study of slavery and slave resistance in Cuba with his engaging study of a crucial 1825 revolt in Matanzas. Barcia sets out to establish the significance of the 1825 revolt, arguing that it was a turning point in slave rebellions in Cuba, an action distinct from previous incidents in that it was organized by Africans rather than collaborative groups that included slave and free, Africans and creoles. This would have several consequences, as Barcia demonstrates, both for the participants and for our understanding of slave uprisings in Cuba.To make the case that this relatively unknown incident was pivotal in the history of Cuban slavery, the author begins with an overview of earlier slave revolts on the island. Barcia situates the Cuban examples within the larger regional context, including US and British North America. He also offers concise discussions of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on Cuba, as well as the colonial constraints imposed by Spain. These all affected growth and development in Cuba, including the area near Matanzas, where a rapid increase of the enslaved African population helped create the conditions for the slave revolts.Barcia situates his study in relation to scholarship on rebellions in Cuba by Robert Paquette, Matt Childs, and Gloría García in order to highlight the differences of the 1825 revolt. He also contrasts the context of this revolt to slaves’ experiences as described in the works of Manuel Moreno Frajinals, Fernando Ortiz, and Laird Bergad. This contrast is significant because it enables Barcia to discuss the larger picture of plantation agriculture on the island and show that the landscape of slavery in Cuba was much more complex than many might assume. Revolts occurred in many places and involved slaves on multiple plantations as well as in urban locations, but Barcia significantly demonstrates that many rebellions began on coffee plantations rather than on sugar cane plantations, as has often been assumed. The story of the 1825 revolt that Barcia tells is as much about the growth of the coffee district and the coffee plantation complex as it is about a consequential revolt. This work joins other recent studies, such as those by María Elena Díaz and Charlotte Cosner, that shift away from sugar, the focus of the vast majority of the historiography on slavery in Cuba, to other important topics.Beyond this important contribution, Barcia is centrally concerned to show that acts of revolt were rooted in African cultural understandings of war. Using extensive documentation, Barcia recreates the revolt’s cells, describing their leaders, the steps they followed, and the violence that occurred, as well as the reaction of the survivors. Through this painstakingly reconstructed detail Barcia demonstrates a point he has argued elsewhere: that African military knowledge and experience, especially among the leaders, was a crucial factor in the rebellions in Cuba from this revolt on. This is best seen in the uprising’s planning by an ethnically diverse group of slaves living on several different farms.Barcia rightly notes that to better understand this rebellion and its importance we must also know why the slaves rebelled. Barcia offers some of his strongest analysis in explaining the counterintuitive connection between the relatively easier lives for slaves on coffee plantations, compared to their counterparts on sugar cane plantations, and revolt. He attributes this to increased freedom of movement, evidenced in the revolt’s planning. The second factor was their African backgrounds, which included an understanding of the ways of war. This is a compelling case but does not speak to why slaves gathered to plot and ultimately rebel rather than to interact benignly. Barcia does an excellent job discussing the motivations of authorities in Havana and Matanzas as well as planters in Guamacaro; existing documents illuminate their reactions to events as they unfolded. Admittedly, it is more difficult to get at the slaves’ proactive motives for revolt, as Barcia notes; the authorities were the ones who produced the documentation of the event, who told the stories they wanted to tell and who thereby distorted the testimonies of the captured rebelling Africans.The work concludes with a rousing call for more studies, acknowledging that this is a first attempt at addressing some of these largely ignored issues. The author also notes that nearly all the literature that actively takes up the connection between slave revolts and the Age of Revolution suggested by Ira Berlin ignore Cuba, even though, as Barcia has shown, there were important rebellions during the period that warrant investigation.Barcia, with this monograph, has started us on the road to filling a substantial gap in the historiography of slavery in Cuba. This work will also prove to be a significant contribution that connects African origins with the cultural practices of enslaved Afri-cans and African-descended people in the Western Hemisphere.

Theorizing Africana Religions:

These edited proceedings of a 2013 symposium at Northwestern University are organized around the question of how to theorize the study of Africana religions across wide expanses of time and space. An international body of scholars representing the fields of history, religious studies, anthropology, American studies, sociology, African studies, classics, and African American studies gathered in a two-day event to consider the past, present, and future of their shared commitment to understanding the religions of African and African-descended people. Scholars discuss the challenges of and opportunities for the study of Africana religions from ancient to modern times, across Africa and its diaspora.

Negritude, Eurocentrism, and African Agency: For an Africentered Renaissance of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Philosophy

The twenty-first century has witnessed a renaissance of Negritude, spearheaded by Souleymane Diagne, Donna Jones, and Messay Kebede. Saving Senghor’s philosophy from the colonial dialectics in which it is traditionally confined, these scholars offer a strong rebuttal to Senghor’s past critics by presenting Negritude as rooted in anti-positivist scholarship. Despite its importance, this renewed interest in Senghorian studies risks relapsing into a presentation of Negritude as a reiteration of Western metanarratives. Negritude should be read as a philosophy rooted in African cultures. This perspective will confirm the renaissance of Negritude beyond the modernWestern invention of Africa and African-descended peoples.

The Flesh of Amalgamation: Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness

The Flesh of Amalgamation:Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness Tryon P. Woods (bio) The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. By Tavia Nyong'o. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 230 pages. $67.50 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. By Jared Sexton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 345 pages. $67.50 (cloth). $22.50 (paper). The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. . . . And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it's not told—literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning. —M. NourbeSe Philip In the postscript to her indomitable poetic treatise on black life and death in the making of the modern world, M. NourbeSe Philip writes of the ongoing mutilation of black humanity through the language of the legal text. She finds, for example, no word for recovering the millions of Africans buried in the "liquid grave" of the Middle Passage: "I find words like resurrect and subaquatic but not 'exaqua.' Does this mean that unlike being interred, once you're underwater there is no retrieval—that you can never be 'exhumed' from water?" In the face of this historical cataclysm, Philip uses her poetry to foment a disorder of her own, in search of yet another site of maroonage from what Saidiya Hartman terms slavery's afterlife. To "release the story that cannot be told," Philip mutilates the text herself, seeking to "literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning verbs."1 I find it compelling to consider how Philip's meditations might extend to the contemporary study of race. Is there an imposition of meaning perpetuating a similar kind of violence on the black subject of critical race studies? [End Page 437] Within the American studies community, for instance, there seem to be parallel discussions on race. The primary distinction between these two tracks hinges on what to make of racial blackness, a splitting reminiscent of "the presence of excised Africans" explored by Philip (199). Is blackness but one among a diversity of subjectivities and, historical particulars notwithstanding, essentially no different from these other positions, identities, and experiences in terms of authorizing analyses of suffering and struggle? Or is the rupture that blackness represents so essential to the formation of the social itself that any analysis of violence or injustice that is not centered in, derived from, or accountable to the suffering of African-descended peoples risks missing the crux (as opposed to the totality) of the social formation? Tavia Nyong'o's Amalgamation Waltz and Jared Sexton's Amalgamation Schemes offer answers to these questions that might discomfit many American studies scholars. Indeed, perhaps their interventions into the matter of racial blackness and its place within the various analytic frameworks of American studies scholars has something to do with their heretofore quiet reception. While both books have been duly reviewed in a handful of journals, thus far they have enjoyed only scant critical engagement from American studies scholars. American studies has become a scholarly community that takes pride in its activist bona fides, that foregrounds its commitment to progressive politics, and that positions social justice as central to its avowed raison d'être. With this in mind, I am wondering if this reluctance to engage indexes Philip's description of "slavery—the story that simultaneously cannot be told, must be told, and will never be told" (206). In the June 2012 issue of American Quarterly, this two-track discourse on race was on full display. Dylan Rodríguez wrote a gentle indictment of the response to the public spectacle of state violence on November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, when campus police pepper sprayed students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as part of the Occupy movement. Rodríguez rightfully contrasts the outrage and moral indignation from left-liberal quarters, which was both national and international because of the viral spread of video footage from...

Beyond Black and White

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

Africana Religious Studies

Our position in this essay is provisional and dialogical as we hope to begin a conversation that will inspire productive exchange and innovative agendas for the future of Africana religious studies. We elaborate our vision for ARS as a field of study by emphasizing the accomplishments and limitations of major research lineages that intersect with its priorities. We find our voice in the emergent conversations on Africana religions by asking (1) How will the field of Africana religious studies enhance knowledge production on the religious cultures of African-descended peoples worldwide? And (2) how will the field of Africana religious studies address theoretical and methodological inadequacies of longer-standing fields and disciplinary arenas in which scholars have conducted research on African-descended peoples and their religious cultures?

Frequency and origin of haplotypes associated with the beta-globin gene cluster in individuals with trait and sickle cell anemia in the Atlantic and Pacific coastal regions of Colombia

Sickle cell anemia is a genetic disease with high prevalence in people of African descent. There are five typical haplotypes associated with this disease and the haplotypes associated with the beta-globin gene cluster have been used to establish the origin of African-descendant people in America. In this work, we determined the frequency and the origin of haplotypes associated with hemoglobin S in a sample of individuals with sickle cell anemia (HbSS) and sickle cell hemoglobin trait (HbAS) in coastal regions of Colombia. Blood samples from 71 HbAS and 79 HbSS individuals were obtained. Haplotypes were determined based on the presence of variable restriction sites within the β-globin gene cluster. On the Pacific coast of Colombia the most frequent haplotype was Benin, while on the Atlantic coast Bantu was marginally higher than Benin. Eight atypical haplotypes were observed on both coasts, being more diverse in the Atlantic than in the Pacific region. These results suggest a differential settlement of the coasts, dependent on where slaves were brought from, either from the Gulf of Guinea or from Angola, where the haplotype distributions are similar. Atypical haplotypes probably originated from point mutations that lost or gained a restriction site and/or by recombination events.

Editors’ Note

We are thrilled to inaugurate a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal devoted to understanding the religions of African-descended people and the diverse religious heritage of Africa and the African diaspora.This is a publication not only for religious studies scholars and theologians but also for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, literature and language scholars, black studies scholars, political scientists, and all other humanists and social scientists who think about the meaning and function of religion in the lives of African-descended people. The journal will advance the multidisciplinary study of Africana religion and will encourage its authors and readers to be in conversation with one another across the broad intellectual expanse of Africana religions.The journal also provides an unprecedented opportunity for specialists to examine the connections and ruptures among the peoples and religious traditions associated with Africa and the African diaspora. We see the terms Africana and religion as heuristic and generative. They are dynamic intellectual categories whose meanings will be shaped by the ways in which our authors define and contest them in these pages.In order to demonstrate the value of intellectual exchange about Africana religions across geographic, thematic, and temporal boundaries, we invited some of our board members to discuss what the purview of Africana religions implies for scholarship. We encouraged them to select whatever key issue, question, or problem reflected their passion for the field and to write about it in the way that they desired. The result is a rich group of articles that includes both original research and theoretical analysis. This special edition of the journal sets the tone for the kinds of questions that we hope future authors will address.The journal has been made possible by the generous financial support of the Department of African American Studies and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University and the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Equally vital have been the contributions of a thirty-four-member editorial board whose scholarship has become essential reading in the study of Africana religions in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Finally, we thank our partners at Pennsylvania State University Press who have offered extraordinary assistance in launching this journal.