African Diaspora In The Americas Research Articles

Blackness in the Black Legend: How narratives of race and slavery in the Amistad affair shaped anti-Hispanicism and "American Exceptionalism"

Abstract: This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative.

African Diaspora Protection: Amulets in New Spain, New Granada, and the Caribbean

Objective: To underline that beyond the territories under Portuguese rule, evidence of the use of protective amulets can also be found in places under Hispanic control and the Caribbean. This study aims to enrich historiography on the subject and dialogue with it regarding source analysis and a rereading based on the descriptions of central-western Africa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Methodology: It interrogates sources widely used for the study of African matrix cultures in America from a different perspective and reviews non-written sources that allow visualizing written ones in theircontext. Originality: This paper contributes to the understanding of how sources can be reread to research African Diaspora cultures in the light of their connected history, tracing the use of these amulets in specific socio-cultural contexts. Conclusions: By considering and interrogating diverse sources on the conversion of Africans and the African diaspora in the Americas, these stories transcend the immutable benevolence of Catholicism and Eurocentrism and question the myopia of the Jesuits and inquisitors in New Spain and New Granada when observing African customs.

The Well That Wept Blood

Abstract This article uses the oral myth of a blood-weeping water well from a small city in the Amazon River to discuss the origins and the significance of haunted waterscapes for Black Amazonians. According to this myth, a well that still exists on the lands of an ancient sugar plantation weeps blood to mourn the slaves whose bodies were carelessly thrown there after a life of exploitation and abuse. The article tracks the history of the myth by interrogating its Indigenous substrate, its arrival to Amazonia in the nineteenth century thanks to Bantu-speaking enslaved Africans, and its additional twenty-first-century changes in a context of post–military dictatorship Black rural mobilization. It points to the centrality of haunted waterscapes and slave ghostlore in present-day processes of identity building and Black mobilization in Amazonia (Brazil), and highlights the necessity to study analog processes across the African diaspora in the Americas.

Western modernity, cities, and race: Challenges to decolonial praxis in the African diaspora in the Americas

AbstractHow do we decolonize cities? By demanding control over their land and organizing their communities according to ethnic traditions and ancestral ontologies, Afro‐descendant movements in the Americas create territories of life—self‐determined collectives in which people can experience new forms of life. Decolonial authors who have studied these communities define them as a path to decoloniality—a rupture with modern/colonial logics. However, most of the studies focus on communities in rural areas. Why are urban spaces not vital to the debates about decoloniality? Do cities pose specific challenges to the creation of territories of life? This paper explores these questions. Analyzing the urban experience of the African diaspora in the Americas, I argue that urban spaces challenge decoloniality because cities are often represented as the spatial and racial image of Western modernity, as white places of progress and development. I also argue this representation is based on Black people's evisceration. Finally, this paper seeks to contribute to decolonial urban struggles. Thus, I propose an urban decolonial praxis—an analytical lens and a praxis of research committed to decoloniality to explore cities' decolonization through the redefinition of territories of life, the redefinition of what ‘being urban’ means, and the wide range of urban resistances.

The silence of the letters: Slavery, education and freedom in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil, 19th century)

Objective: The goal of this paper is deciphering the “silence of letters” and to understand the meanings of enslaved and freed people’s education and instruction in Imperial Rio de Janeiro. Originality/contribution: The article suggests reading and learning about other historical experiences with the intent of questioning the widespread understanding that African enslaved people weren’t educated. Method: Based on a comparative method and analysis of sources, the article seeks to understanding the existence of subjects made invisible in academic production: literate and educated enslaved women and men. Through the movement of connections, it is essential to map out the debate around the instruction and education of enslaved people in academic studies of the African diaspora in the Americas. Strategies/information collection: Does studying other African diaspora experiences help understanding Brazil? Conclusions: The article conclusion is that the meaning of education and literacy for enslaved people in the Americas allows for a more complex understanding of the Brazilian case, with particular attention given to the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 19th Century.

Africanisms

Abstract This essay attempts to chart the career of the concept of ‘Africanisms’ in the anthropology and history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. After surveying the origins of the concept, I focus on the role of Melville J. Herskovits’ highly influential mobilisation of the concept, its major mid-20th century critiques, and a highly influential late 20th century reaction to the terms of these debates. I will conclude by indicating how Africanist historians have come to repurpose this concept around the turn of the millennium, and how more recent scholarship might indicate the end of its usefulness as an analytical category.

Language contact in Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler. Edited by Cecilia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić & Philipp Angermeyer

This article reviews Language contact in Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler $158

The Gradual Loss of African Indigenous Vegetables in Tropical America: A Review

Leaf vegetables and other edible greens are a crucial component of traditional diets in sub-Saharan Africa, used popularly in soups, sauces, and stews. In this review, we trace the trajectories of 12 prominent African indigenous vegetables (AIVs) in tropical America, in order to better understand the diffusion of their culinary and ethnobotanical uses by the African diaspora. The 12 AIVs were selected from African reference works and preliminary reports of their presence in the Americas. Given the importance of each of these vegetables in African diets, our working hypothesis was that the culinary traditions associated with these species would be continued in tropical America by Afro-descendant communities. However, a review of the historical and contemporary literature, and consultation with scholars, shows that the culinary uses of most of these vegetables have been gradually lost. Two noteworthy exceptions include okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) and callaloo (Amaranthus viridis), although the latter is not the species used in Africa and callaloo has only risen to prominence in Jamaica since the 1960s. Nine of the 12 AIVs found refuge in the African-derived religions Candomble and Santeria, where they remain ritually important. In speculating why these AIVs did not survive in the diets of the New World African diaspora, one has to contemplate the sociocultural, economic, and environmental forces that have shaped—and continue to shape—these foodways and cuisines since the Atlantic slave trade. Since these vegetables are neglected and underutilized species (NUS) that represent the biocultural heritage of the African diaspora in the Americas, their culinary traditions merit intensified scholarly attention and conservation efforts.

The Burden of Cardiovascular Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Black Diaspora.

For over four decades the National Medical Association (NMA) and the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) have sought to bring to national attention the disparate burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) among African Americans. However, systematic inquiry has been inadequate into the burden of CVD in the poor countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the African diaspora in the Americas outside the USA. However, recently, the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) has offered new tools for such inquiry. Several initial efforts in that direction using 2010 data have been published. This article highlights some new findings for SSA for 2016. It also suggests that NMA and ABC further this effort by direct advocacy and collaboration with the GBD to make estimates of CVD burden in African Americans and South American Blacks explicitly available in future iterations.

Aquele evento, esta memória: notas sobre a antropologia das diásporas africanas no Novo Mundo

Neste artigo de 1991, David Scott analisa importantes marcos da antropologia estadunidense acerca dos povos de ascendência africana no Novo Mundo: o trabalho de Melville Herskovits, nos anos 1920 a 1940, e o de Richard Price, nos anos 1970 e 1980 – dando ênfase às pesquisas de ambos entre os Saamaka do Suriname, que figuram como “uma espécie de metonímia antropológica” nas discussões sobre a diáspora africana nas Américas. Scott buscará compreender como a “ciência da cultura” fundada por Boas construiu “o Negro do Novo Mundo” como objeto teórico e passou a fornecer o vocabulário autorizado capaz de identificá-lo e de representá-lo. O autor tece críticas ao modo como tal antropologia constrói uma narrativa de continuidades entre memórias precisas no presente e os tropos “África” e “escravidão” em passados autênticos e verificáveis, para depois propor aquelas que considera serem as tarefas teóricas adequadas para o complexo campo discursivo da “tradição”.

Investigating the “Taíno” ancestry of the Jamaican Maroons: a new genetic (DNA), historical, and multidisciplinary analysis and case study of the Accompong Town Maroons

ABSTRACTWhile scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have popularized the use of genetic data (DNA) as a source of African American history and ancestry, similar studies are lacking for other peoples of African descent. The current study is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project undertaken by a historian of Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas and a genetic anthropologist. Methodologically, we incorporate traditional sources of historical inquiry, as well as oral history and genetic data (mitochondrial, Y chromosome, and autosomal DNA), to investigate and suggest answers to the following question in popular and scholarly debates about the ethnogenesis of the Jamaican Maroons: to what extent did the indigenous Taínos form part of their early history? Taking the Maroon community of Accompong Town as a case study, we use a novel approach that reconsiders and disrupts mainstream scholarly discourses on Maroon ethnogenesis in Jamaica and, by extension, the larger circum-Caribbean world.

Anthologies, Ontologies, and Hauntologies: Resurrecting Léon-Gontran Damas

Anthologies, Ontologies, and HauntologiesResurrecting Léon-Gontran Damas Kathleen Gyssels (bio) In his excellent and most welcome collection of essays, The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966,1 David Murphy illustrates the vibrant art scene in the young republic with a thorough overview of a range of Senegalese authors and artists. And yet, someone is missing: Leon Gontran-Damas, the Martinican-born, French Guyanese cofounder of the Négritude movement, who put together several collections that included works by Senegelase authors. In fact, it was Damas who provided his friend, Négritude cofounder and Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a first copy of what would be his second wide-ranging anthology of African voices in five languages, Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir/A New Survey of Poetry from the Negro World. The potency of this largely forgotten and unacknowledged anthology is revealed when compared with other examples of the genre. What do Nancy Cunard, Blaise Cendrars,2 André Gide, Albert Memmi, L.S. Senghor, Albert Helman, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Edouard Glissant have in common? Published anthologies form a genre that Paul Lauter convincingly argues we should take seriously, since knowledge of most works of "ethnic literature" has remained within classroom walls for too long.3 Anthologies were, and are still today, valued for their didactic function, as well as serving as inventories of new fields and schools of writing. They are essential to the creation of a specific corpus that needs to be presented as a subsystem, one that seeks legitimacy through editorial strategies. Many intellectuals, black and white, Anglo and Francophone, have served as intermediaries between artists and their potential audiences with respect to black literature and postcolonial literature (the Maghreb, for instance, with Memmi's 1969 Anthology of French Writers from the Maghreb). Many of these thinkers—themselves poets and [End Page 2] writers—have promoted literature from the African continent and the black Atlantic world; that is, the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe. In fact, it is hard to imagine how literary schools such as the Harlem Renaissance could have existed without its prominent members publishing collections of their colleagues' writings. Alain Locke and Langston Hughes created literary journals and literary anthologies—Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro (1925) and The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), respectively—inviting the American public to discover black literature, sociology, ethnology, and history. Poets and scholars found ways to raise the visibility of a tradition of (oral) literature and arts hitherto marginalized. In 1934, the extravagant Nancy Cunard, an obsessive white collector as fascinated as Blaise Cendrars with "primitive art," published Negro: An Anthology. Poems and illustrated articles on Africa, the Caribbean, black America, and the black arts rubbed shoulders with work by nonblack artists.4 Anthologies aiming to act as vocal countermovements and boost recognition debated the then-hot issues of racism, inequality, and colonization. Hughes was clearly one of the most inspiring writers, influencing contemporary and younger authors alike, including Damas. Such anthologies were important, as they raised the prestige of established intellectuals while offering the audience an overview of what, in their estimation, were important examples of a certain literary school or movement. Cunard5 befriended key figures of the Harlem Renaissance as well as its French "offspring," the Négritude movement. She paid tribute to both the Anglo-American movement and the cofounders of the French movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who came to her attention following the publication of Césaire's Notebook of a Return to my Native Land.6 In 1948, Senghor published the first important anthology of black writing in French, covering the French Antilles, Haiti, Madagascar and Senegal, which included the poet, David Diop (1927–1980), born to French-speaking African parents in Bordeaux. Released by the prestigious Presses Universitaires de France and introduced by Sartre's thirty-three-page critical essay "Orphée noir," the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française was hugely successful and has since undergone several reprints. Edouard Glissant, leading figure of the next generation of black French writers and founder of...

Letter to the Readers

Letter to the Readers Charles Henry Rowell, Editor & Founder of Callaloo Dear Readers, Please receive this number of Callaloo as our print effort to share with you some of the moments of the two events we staged, during the fall of 2016, to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo in the United States and in the United Kingdom. As you read through the various selected texts presented here, we hope you, too, will look backward and forward in joyous celebration and in hopeful meditation, as we did during our forward-looking engagements at New York University and Oxford University. These were, indeed, historic gatherings, marking the national and international importance of recording, documenting, and distributing in print the literary, cultural, and other intellectual and creative developments in the United States and in a number of other sites of the African Diaspora. The celebration of Callaloo’s fortieth birthday, hosted by New York University’s Creative Writing Program, was a two-day gathering (October 28–29, 2016) that featured presentations by creative writers, academics, and independent intellectuals. Anthony Bogues and Howard Dodson gave keynote addresses that eloquently reminded all attending the celebration of the origin and development of Callaloo, its past and present-day positions among other journals of its kind, as well as Callaloo’s meaning to readers and contributors inside and beyond the academy. The defining aesthetics, originality, and very “well-wrought” lines that mark the poetry of Carl Phillip and Yusef Komunyakaa were palpable, in individual ways, during their readings at the New York celebration. In their provocative and exploring presentations, Margo Crawford, Brent Hayes Edwards, Cheryl Wall, Phillip Brian Harper, and Dagmawi Woubshet affirmed much of what the keynote speakers proclaimed, but, by precept and example, the panelists—and many others who also spoke or performed—offered critical discourses that accounted for and elaborated on Callaloo as the incontestable forum which, since its inception in 1976, has served the African Diaspora in the Americas and in Europe. In their work as artists, academics, and public intellectuals, the large group of participants at the Oxford University celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo (November 23–26, 2016) examined and critiqued subjects, as well as raised questions similar to those we encountered at NYU. Unlike our celebration in New York, however, our Oxford University gathering was not only a celebration; it was also one of the meetings of the Callaloo Conference, whose international body gathers annually in different sites of the African Diaspora. Unlike the conferences, however, the 2016 Oxford gathering focused on Callaloo—its origins, its development, and its future—in the context of not only the quarterly literary and cultural journal as a forum of the African Diaspora, but also as a quarterly publication with allied supporting projects, such as the annual international Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the annual Callaloo • Art, and a monograph project, The Callaloo African Diaspora Series, which is, like Callaloo, also published by the the Johns Hopkins University Press. [End Page 1] Like the annual meetings of the Callaloo Conference, the Oxford celebration of Callaloo’s 40th birthday reflected the collective visions of the native homelands of the presenters, who were born in and now live and work in such countries as the Netherlands, Ghana, Grenada, Surinam, South Africa, France, Greece, Nigeria, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States. The collective cultural and aesthetic traditions that inform the fiction and poetry, respectively, of Karin Amatmoekrim (b. Surinam) of the Netherlands and that of Nick Makoha (b. Uganda) of the UK differed distinctively from that of such US American writers as Jacinda Townsend, Nathaniel Mackey, and Janice Harrington. And yet the voices and concerns of the scholars echoed each other. I am thinking of the presentations of Joan Anim-Addo (UK), Jean-Paul Rocchi (France), Mina Karavanta (Greece), Rizvana Bradley (USA), Marlon Ross (USA), and Robert Reid-Pharr (USA). I cannot imagine anyone present who has lived in the African Diaspora but did not understand or was not thoroughly informed, as well as challenged, by the provocative and seminal exchange between Anthony Bogues and John Akomfrah, who...

Remembering Dr. Laurence Prescott

Renowned scholar Dr. Laurence Prescott passed away on November 27, 2016 at the age of 73. He was one of the founding members of ALARA and served as President for many years. Within his vast scholarship, he is particularly known for his work on Afro-Colombian writers Candelario Obeso, Jorge Artel, and Manuel Zapata Olivella. For those interested in the African Diaspora in the Americas, his work bringing to light the correspondence and friendship between Manuel Zapata Olivella and Langston Hughes is particularly ground breaking.

Neighborhood, Festival, and Ethnography: The African Diaspora in The Americas

Neighborhood, Festival, and Ethnography: The African Diaspora in The Americas

Across imperial boundaries: Black social networks across the Iberian South Atlantic, 1760–1810

ABSTRACTRethinking the African Diaspora in the Americas urges scholars to look beyond where Africans came from and where they first disembarked in order to integrate the transimperial dimension. Social networks connecting black communities throughout the Americas constituted an additional feature of the black experience that shaped the political, social, economic, and cultural features of African diasporic communities and the larger societies in which these groups found themselves. Evidence regarding the slaves and freedmen that traveled across the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America best illustrates the significance of transimperial networks for local black communities. This article reveals that these transimperial social ties proved essential for black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This contributes to discussions of “entangled empires” by showing how free and enslaved Africans and their descendants were immersed in transimperial social networks, which to a certain extent they shaped with their actions. This article emphasizes how military actions surrounding the fall of Portuguese Colonia in 1777 shaped the continuous and substantial black social networks across these borderlands and influenced black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Renin angiotensinogen system gene polymorphisms and essential hypertension among people of West African descent: a systematic review.

This systematic review investigates the high level of hypertension found among urban dwellers in West Africa and in the West African Diaspora in the Americas in relation to variants within the genes encoding the renin angiotensinogen system. For comparison, the results from the Caucasian populations are reviewed as well. Through a PubMed search, 1252 articles were identified and 28 eligible articles assessed in detail of which 13 included a Caucasian population. The results suggest that among the people of West African descent and among the people of Caucasian descent, hypertension is partly related to a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and haplotypes in the renin gene, the angiotensinogen gene, the angiotensinogen I-converting enzyme gene and the angiotensinogen II type 1 receptor gene. Concordance between these two populations was found for some SNPs. However, for others, it was found that the SNPs associating with hypertension and the disease allele frequencies differed between these populations. Understanding the importance of these variants in a modern life setting may assist our understanding of the increased risk of developing hypertension among West Africans. Because of inconsistency in the results, low statistical power and methodological differences between studies, these results can only be taken as indicative of an association.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Winchell Kiddy (1957–2014)

Elizabeth “Betsy” Winchell Kiddy (1957–2014)

Race, culture, and history: Charles Wagley and the anthropology of the African Diaspora in the Americas

When I came to the University of Florida in 1981, I was informed that Charles Wagley was not accepting new graduate students. After my first class with Wagley, he agreed to be my advisor and mentor and I became the last student he accepted. Though better known for his sensitive and pioneering ethnography of indigenous and peasant populations and his influential anthropological/historical overviews of Brazil and Latin America, Wagley and his students' contributions to the study of Afro-American cultures and race relations in the Americas are considerable. Among the important concepts that Wagley articulated were 'social race', 'Plantation America', and the 'amorphous and weakly organized local community without clear boundaries in space or membership'. Wagley guided my dissertation research in Haiti. In it I developed his concept by proposing 'cultural amorphousness' as a 'total cultural style' (following Kroeber) of African Diaspora cultures in the Plantation American cultural sphere: a primary organizing principle that has proved to be an effective adaptation to plantation and its successor societies.

Interpreting the Experiences of the African Diaspora in the Americas

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