African Identity Research Articles

Constructing Identities: Amos Tutuola and the Ibadan Literary Elite in the wake of Nigerian Independence

Constructing Identities: Amos Tutuola and the Ibadan Literary Elite in the wake of Nigerian Independence

THE CREATIVE APPROACH TOWARDS AFRICAN IDENTITY: A SCHOLASTIC DISCOURSE IN HONOR OF AKIN EUBA

This paper focuses on the works of ethnomusicologist and composer, Akin Euba. It examines how Euba projects African identity through his concept of African pianism. The paper explains that the concept provides the background for understanding how the European piano could be used to imitate traditional African musical principles and instruments in works that synthesize African and European elements. The research relies on published literature, the views of Euba, as well as analysis of selected works, mainly, his 'Scenes for Traditional Life'. The study draws attention to the pioneering approach towards expressing African identity in the world of Art Music as well as how Akin Euba’s innovative concept has influenced the younger generation of composers.

EFFECTS OF CAPITALISM AND MASS CULTURE ON THE DIMINUTION OF AFRICAN MUSIC PRACTICE AMONG THE KENYAN YOUTH

After independence, African countries, Kenya included, have since adopted a capitalistic lifestyle which s gradually eroding the African identity of communalism. Though capitalism has some considerable positives, its adoption as a sole replacement of the otherwise pre-colonial communal culture in Africa has brought along a mass culture whose negative effects continue to disintegrate and threaten cohesiveness and unity, the hallmarks of African society. The education system continues to play a big role in the promotion of capitalistic ideals while discreetly disavowing most African cultural practices concomitant with African music practice. This paper seeks to analyze the negative effects of capitalism and mass culture on the African youths. It alsohighlights the attributes of African music practice and the place of education in promoting and restoring abandoned cultural value systems. The method that has been adopted for this study is a mixed method approach. This study espouses that African music practice can be used as a tool for promoting and restoring cultural values through the school and the society. It is a call for introspection by elite Africans regarding their identity and value systems.

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History, by Christopher J. Smith

<i>Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History</i>, by Christopher J. Smith

ROOTLESSNESS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN'S THE DEATH OF THE HEART, AND CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ANGLO-IRISH AND AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Postcolonial literature views the British Empire of the nineteenth century as unique in human history and literary products for it provides writers with different subjects that deal with the idea of how to resurrect the colonized identity even after getting liberation. Postcolonial literature seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other colonized and other colonial powers as British. Such literature and particularly novel, emerged to focus on social, moral, and cultural influences and their interrelation with the impact of English existence upon some countries as Ireland in Europe and Nigeria in Africa. Irish novel shares its genesis with the English novel. When we write of the eighteenth century and use the phrase ' the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novel written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish. This fact is apparent within hands when we talk about the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her novels that show the obvious effect of her Irish identity upon her works during the period of World Wars I and II with a consideration to Ireland as a British colony. The same impact with African culture, postcolonial Nigeria, when its writers saw the changes crept to their traditions. Their literary products concentrated on questioning their nation how to keep and reserve African identity from alternations. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer tried to reflect his culture in a mirror to readers and challenge them with their own strength and weakness in his novel Arrow of God. His novel tackles these weaknesses of the traditional outlook and senses for change. The research paper tackles the concept of rootlessness in postcolonialism through Anglo-Irish novel The Death of the Heart (1938) of Elizabeth Bowen ,which is tackled in the first section , and postcolonial Nigerian novel Arrow of God (1964) written by Chinua Achebe in the second section. The paper ends with conclusions and works cited.

From Ethnic to National Cloth: The Diverse Nature of the Tshivenḓa Ṅwenda

In times past, the Tshivenḓa traditional cloth called Ṅwenda was associated with backwardness, stupidity, and had the Vhavenḓa women undermined for being ‘too rural’. Consequently, many dumped their traditional attire for other clothes to march with the times. Recently, Ṅwenda has been drawing attention from both the Vhavenḓa men and women and other ethnic groups because of the uniqueness and beauty of its embroidery. This article aimed to investigate the reason(s) Ṅwenda recently gained prominence and appreciation among the Vhavenḓa and other ethnic groups. The article adopted the qualitative approach and the exploratory design to collect data on the diverse nature and function of Ṅwenda. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixteen purposively selected designers from six villages in Venḓa, including the Ṱhohoyanḓou Flea Market in the Limpopo Province and three townships in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. Two tailors of Miṅwenda were selected from each of the aforementioned villages and townships. Undergirded by the Appreciative and Naturalistic Inquiries, the study also relied on the Inductive Thematic Analysis method for data analysis. It was found that Ṅwenda is used for special occasions such as weddings, parties, graduation ceremonies, and other social gatherings. Ṅwenda was also used to cover chairs, tables, and to decorate gowns, cushions, lampshades, bags, bedspreads or duvet covers, among other things. The article recommends the consideration of the role and significance of Tshivenḓa traditional attires in the ongoing discourses on the consolidation and traditionalisation of African identity as well as women’s empowerment initiatives in the postcolonial context.

Deconstructing the Blackface Minstrel Show, (Re)constructing African American Identity: the Case of Olio by Tyehimba Jess

Deconstructing the Blackface Minstrel Show, (Re)constructing African American Identity: the Case of <i>Olio</i> by Tyehimba Jess

3 Stages of a Pan-African Identity Framework for Establishing Self-Sovereign Identity With Blockchain

The African continent (specifically its overwhelming in(animate) resources) is often referred to as the sleeping giant by magazines, blogs, research presentations and articles, and NGOs [such as World Bank]. Reasons for this moniker/title include the continent’s plentiful natural resources, its large and quickly growing young population, and the young population’s quick adoption and acclimatization to technology. Most countries on the continent are known as developing countries due to lack of access to safe drinking water, reliable electricity and roads, sanitation and hygiene, and a high number of people with tropical/infectious diseases. However, due to the usefulness of cellular phones and technology, several countries and companies within them have focused on cell phone proliferation (91% in Kenya). Smart phone usage allows Kenyans access to the world’s information and potentially endless innovation. Given that a large number of Kenyans with smartphones use social media, coupled with the advent of Europe’s GDPR (general data protection regulation), African identity and its associated data became an area of great interest. As the world is quickly progressing into a digital economy, a solution must be created that allows us to regain and control our identities, doing our best to ensure losing such is infinitely close to computationally and probabilistically impossible/improbable. Developing a blockchain-based identity backbone using biometrics and historical family information while allowing government-based identification documents is the best way forward. Three stages have been identified as necessities to accomplish the development of this system before opening it further beyond the pan-African worldwide community. The three stages are defined by systems that allow for biometric/demographic registration (stage 1), interoperability and security hardening (stage 2), and biometric modality data analysis/organization/association (stage 3).

The management discourse: collective or strategic performance drive?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to engage with the discourse on the assumed existence of an distinct “African management” model. It critically deconstructs the concepts and submits an alternative strategy to address the need to understand what is happening in management of business in Africa.Design/methodology/approachQualitative critical text analysis is used to understand the discourse on the nature of “African management” from the extant literature. The identity theory informs the understanding of the references to “African” as fundamental to identify a distinct management model. This analysis is supplemented by empirical case study research into successful African business.FindingsScholars failed to conceptualise what is “African”, and subsequently also what constitutes “African management”. This conceptual void undermines the critical reconstruction of a single African management model. Empirical research into actual management practices emerge as fundamental to systematic progress in this discourse. This research points to diverse management traditions converging into pragmatic practices.Research limitations/implicationsOnly a limited number of case studies were conducted into management history in Africa. This paper argues for an extended research programme, but this is future work.Practical implicationsIt suggests a research strategy for scholars in African business studies, business history and management history to collaborate towards making a solid contribution to the economic development of our continent.Social implicationsThis research has the potential of forging collaboration in business among all of the people in Africa.Originality/valueA critical text analysis is used to expose the conceptual lacunae that undermines progress in the discourse. This paper contributes to the literature on “African management” by systematically deconstructing the concept of “African identity” as a prerequisite to the management discourse. By signalling ethnic nostalgia, the critical reconceptualisation of Africanness offers an intellectually creative strategy out of the stalled discourse.

Camwood: African and African American identities at the crossroads

ABSTRACT This essay considers the significance of camwood, a West-African tree, in the work of a Nigerian American writer, Femi Euba. By reviewing the symbolic association of the vegetal trope, the essay explores camwood as a hermeneutical tool to reflect upon Black fate and Black identities in the Atlantic world.

Cedar Hill: Frederick Douglass’s Literary Landscape and the Racial Construction of Nature

AbstractThis essay explores the overlooked significance of Cedar Hill, the landscape estate Frederick Douglass bought in 1877 near Washington, DC, both as a literary landscape and as a form of participation in the nineteenth-century elite culture of nature. Literary landscapes, associated with specific authors and their genius, emerged during the nineteenth century as important sites of memory and focal points for new practices of literary interpretation, tourism, and pilgrimage. The essay demonstrates Douglass’s self-conscious cultivation of Cedar Hill as a literary landscape that supported his claims for elite cultural status and full democratic citizenship. Cedar Hill allowed Douglass to claim both legal and symbolic possession over the landscape, establishing his connection with nature in ways that rivalled southern agrarian plantations and responded to his and other African Americans’ dispossession from the land through slavery. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death as a powerful site of African American identity, but its racial associations disqualified it as nature in the dominant white cultural imagination. Exploring Cedar Hill’s lost legacy as a literary landscape sheds new light both on Douglass’s identity and on the wider intersection of race, landscape, and nature in nineteenth-century and contemporary America.

Skin whitening as a menace to African identity through Tony Morrison's 'The Bluest Eyes': An Afrocentric examination

The African democratic forces, among other things, aimed to resuscitate and re-essentialise African identities that the colonial administration had endangered earlier. These autonomous corps dispensed mechanisms to champion Africanism and conscientise African natives about their heritage. The cherishing of African identities automated decolonial shifts and inculcated an urge into Africans to be proud of who they are and where they come from. Notwithstanding these efforts, the study diagnoses skin whitening as a stubborn nemesis that menaces the authenticity of Africanism in the present day. Many Africans, especially black women appear to be gravitated to skin whitening. This act embraces the attempt to alter one’s dark skin tone to be bright. Most of the skin whiteners are postulated to whiten their skins in an effort to qualify into the modern-day Eurocentric criterions of beauty at the expense of their black (African) identity. This paper employed a qualitative methodology and has relied on secondary data to unveil the extent to which skin whitening imperils African identities. It has employed Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes as a lens to crystalise the impacts of skin whitening on Africanism. The study has discovered that the skin-whitening phenomenon epitomises and perpetuates Eurocentric ideologies and it is preferred by most women because of the assumed glory that comes with the white identity such as social class, privilege, attractiveness, favour, and admiration.

“I am an African”: A Philosophical Enquiry of Identity and Culture

With the public frenzy over Thabo Mbeki’s speech, “I am an African” that was delivered in 1996, South Africa has since become a subject of debate as to who is an African and what constitutes as African. This has been going on for almost two decades and a half now. Mbeki’s speech appears to have evoked solemn questions relating to the issues of identity and culture. Subsequent to that speech, the South African public began to question what it meant to be African. The central point of enquiry was: what makes one an African? Is it the color of their skin? Their citizenship? Or is one merely an African because others regard him or her as such? These and many other questions arise when one touches upon the subject of Africans. These perplexing questions, however, are not only unique to the South African context; they apply, to some extent, to the general continent of Africa. With talks and debates about African renaissance, decoloniality, and indigenization, the question of African identity and culture resurfaces. Here, the discussion hubs around the issue of African persona and what it means to be authentically African. By means of document analysis, this paper critically employs a philosophical approach in order to grapple with the subject of identity and culture. This is done through a systematic discussion of the following facets: (a) history, (b) identity, and (c) culture. These three facets are therefore critically engaged in order to establish what constitute an African and what can be characterized as an African identity.

Higher Hussle: Nipsey's Post Hip Hop Literacies

Nipsey Hussle is a post hip hop icon. In this essay, we mine popular music and media coverage of Nipsey to describe his artistry and advocacy anchored by his articulation of an African American diasporic identity, his ambivalence as an independent rapper within a mainstream music industry, and his leverage of Black capital in his Crenshaw community. We address these relationships--identity, industry, and community--to situate Nipsey within African American and hip hop literacies. By recalling relationships and roots, we call attention to emancipated blackness enacted by Nipsey Hussle.

The Fragmentation of the African Americans' Identity In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The Fragmentation of the African Americans' Identity In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

African proverbs as pedagogical tools in the contemporary education system

Recently, there have been calls for the decolonisation of education in Africa to promote a culturally relevant, inclusive and appealing education system. African proverbs, as a component of indigenous knowledge system (IKS), are a cultural template and framework through which African societies leave an indelible mark. The beauty of proverbs lies in their relevance, which includes being a way of impacting wisdom, education and morality. Hence, considering the experiences of colonisation by African countries, displaced and consequently replaced African identity and the call for decolonisation across the education system, this study aims to explore and appraise the relevance of African proverbs in education. This study employs a qualitative research design which is underpinned by textual and interpretative analyses of selected Yoruba proverbs. Among other things, it is observed that the content and instructional component of these proverbs can reorient learners on the importance of education, provide a moral and culturally inclusive education and aid reflective learning and easy understanding of abstract ideas. This study concludes that the application of proverbs by educators can be a useful tool in enhancing the teaching and learning process and cultivating good character.

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Existential Dilemma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison verbalizes in novel manners the pain and battle of a traumatized self and local area. In her novels, the traumatic truth of a dark self shows itself in the characters' self-hatred and self-disdain, and in the deficiency of their individual and cultural identity. Her fiction resolves issues of African American history, traumatizing experience and identity, often additionally captivating with inquiries of sex and sex, and, less significantly, class. When writing in a climate where everything except a couple of dark writers battled for acknowledgment, presently the subject of much recognition, Morrison’s work has provoked various and assorted basic reactions. The Beloved and Song of Solomon utilize the devices of disruption, corruption and sensuality to portray the traumatic encounters of the Black ladies’ heroes. During the last fifteen or so years grant treating the Morrison oeuvre has blossomed, making her clearly quite possibly the most talked about creators of the contemporary time frame. Toni Morrison’s In her novel, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison shows the overwhelming impacts of slavery and its specialist disasters as these impacts show themselves through numerous ages of one family. The trauma of slavery is with the end goal that nobody contacted by it can break liberated from the past, even a long time after actual freedom. This is valid for the novel's hero, Sethe, a once in the past oppressed lady living in Cincinnati after the Civil War and third novel Song of Solomon (1977) goes about as a milestone in her profession, since it uncovers the imaginative development she has acquired, and furthermore presents the arrangement she has observed to tackle the overwhelming issues she depicts in her initially traumatizing novel. The distinctive traumatic occasions make Morrison's novels appropriate for logo helpful perusing and examination.

‘I Am an African’

The question, who is an African? in the context of understanding African identity has biological, historical, cultural, religious, political, racial, linguistic, social, philosophical, and even geographical colourations. Scholars as well as commentators have continued to grapple with it as it has assumed a syncretistic or intersectional characterisation. The same applies to, “what is Africa?” because of the defined Western construct of its geography. This foray of concepts appears to be captured in ‘I am an African’, a treatise that exudes the telos of African past, present and the unwavering hope that the future of Africans and Africa is great in spite of the cynicism and loss of faith that the present seems to have foisted on the minds of many an African. Through a critical analysis, it is argued that African religion has a value that is capable of resolving the contentious identity crisis of an African.

Fiction as prosthesis: Reading the contemporary African queer short story

In this article, I read contemporary African queer fiction as a tool employed by writers to represent and rehumanise queer identities in Sub-Saharan African societies. In these societies, heteropatriarchal authorities strive to disable queer agency by dehumanising queer subjects. I argue that African queer identities, desires, and experiences are controlled and restricted under the heterosexual gaze, which strives to ensure that human sexuality benefits patriarchy, promoting heterosexual desire as ‘natural’ and authentically African and pathologising homosexuality. African writers then employ fiction as a means of rehumanising queer subjects in these disabling heteronormative societies to grant voice and agency to identities that have been multifariously subjugated and/or deliberately erased, and fiction acts as a type of prosthesis, a term I borrow from disability studies. Rewriting such lives in fiction does not only afford discursive spaces to queer identities, but also reconstructs the queer person as a human subject worth the dignity that they are often denied. In the article, I analyse a selection of six short stories from the collections Queer Africa 2: New Stories and Fairytales for Lost Children to demonstrate how these stories function as prosthesis for queer people in disabling societies.