Afro-Caribbean Culture Research Articles

Rethinking the Historical Development of Caribbean Performance Culture from an Afro-Iberian Perspective

Abstract This article advocates for a new perspective on Caribbean performance traditions by adopting an Afro-Iberian perspective. It argues that we are able to acquire a better understanding of the historical development of some of the most enigmatic Caribbean performances, including Jankunu, by taking into consideration that many of those who built the foundations of Afro-Caribbean culture had already adopted cultural and religious elements rooted in Iberian traditions before their arrival in the Americas. A comparative analysis demonstrates a series of parallels between early witness accounts of Jankunu and Iberian calenda traditions. In order to explain this, the article points to Iberian dominance in the early-modern Atlantic and, in particular, Portuguese influences in Africa. It highlights the importance of confraternities and argues that it was in the context of African variants of these mutual-aid and burial societies that elements rooted in Iberian traditions entered Afro-Caribbean culture.

Cultural Appropriation and Capitalism: Co-opting Blaxploitation in the Filmic <i>Live and Let Die</i>

Of the various western, popular culture images of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, James Bond films remain some of the most enduring. Based on novels by British writer Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the cinematic representations of MI6 super-spy 007 contain a revival of the master narrative - one promoting a colonial storyline replete with a white, male saviour and steeped in the hegemony and toxic masculinity common in literature from the latter half of the nineteenth century, at the height of the British Empire’s colonial expansion period. While the initial Bond films, released in the 1960s, strictly adhered to this narrative, by the early 1970s - when western audiences had changed - maintaining the format originally set in Fleming's novels and in the earlier films was no longer feasible. Specifically, black audiences were no longer willing to financially support a movie industry that either neglected or fetishised them. The result of this realisation was the film Live and Let Die (1973) starring Roger Moore the new James Bond, a more English, higher-class replacement for the rougher-edged Scottish Sean Connery (Schwetman 2017, 106-7). Co-opting blaxploitation by including elements of the genre in the plot, as well as imbuing Live and Let Die with elements of African American and Afro-Caribbean culture, positions the film firmly in the category of a cinematic example of cultural appropriation. As such, Live and Let Die remains a problematic film for its incorporation of black, western cultures while promoting a British master narrative.

From Reverse Ethnography to Cultural Performance: Reenacting Colonial Shows in Contemporary France

Cuban-American performance artist Coco Fusco uses the phrase “reverse ethnography” in her essay “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” to describe what she did in 1993 when she exhibited herself and her co-performer Guillermo Gomez-Peña in the United States and in Europe as caged newly discovered Amerindians. Using the codes of colonial shows, she pretended to be the colonial exhibit, while the true exhibits were the viewers and their (post)colonial concerns. This intention seems to be central to South African Brett Bailey's Exhibit B: the museological exhibition of performers of African and Afro-Caribbean descent embodying the different stages of the (post)colonial enslavement of Africans by Europeans, from slavery to asylum seeking. Despite Bailey's best intentions, the show met with disapproval in London (where it was eventually cancelled) and encountered an even greater opposition in Paris in November 2014. Whereas the media tended to analyse the opposition in binary terms (Black protesters opposing a White artist for daring to show African suffering), a closer analysis of the petitions and interviews points to the problem of African and Afro-Caribbean invisibility in French culture and cultural institutions. Indeed, the recent fascination with “Afropeanism” fails to move from the narrow spheres of academia and small theatres to national stages. Once a performer in Bailey's installation (Exhibit B hires local performers from each city it visits), Guadeloupean choreographer Chantal Loïal offers an alternative to the South African's vision when she impersonates Sara (“Saartjie”) Baartman (also known as the Hottentot Venus) in her dance show On t’appelle Vénus. Loïal exposes and questions the spectators’ laughter while mixing in South African songs, Guadeloupean chants, and African dance moves. The famous colonial exhibit thus becomes a powerful illustration of African and Afro-Caribbean culture. Despite being recently awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur (one of the highest official distinctions in France), Loïal was not appointed head of the Centre Chorégraphique National de Nantes for which she was shortlisted: her failure seems to underline the above-mentioned lack of visibility she campaigns against. This essay shows how Bailey's installation and Loïal's danced performance expose, sometimes unintentionally, the possibilities and failures of the cultural representation of African and Afro-Caribbean history and culture in contemporary France.

Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper: Diaspora and Continuities Shaped by National and Regional Cultures

Since its roots, African ("Black") Canadian literature keeps the singularity of its multiple facets. As George Elliot Clarke notes, this literature includes "the new and the old, the come-from-away and the down-home, the urban and the rural, the pull of the regional and the equally irresistible seductions of African-American—and Afro-Caribbean—culture." Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper, Caribbean immigrants to Canada, illustrate this diversity in their writings. Having their poetry as evidence, this study discusses how the two poets give voice both to the history of diaspora and colonialism in a large sense, and its continuities in specific topographies, shaped by national and regional cultures. In doing so, I expect to complicate the transparency of the hyphen—Brand and Cooper as Caribbean-Canadian writers—by examining their hybrid borderland poetics. As Fred Wah observes, the hyphen, "a provocateur of flux," creates "a volatile space that is inhabited by a wide range of voices."

Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature by Jason Frydman

382 CLA JOURNAL Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 184 pp. ISBN: 9780813935737. Paperback: $24.50. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature explains the rationale for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1827 statement that “[n]ational literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is at hand” (1). In the introduction, Jason Frydman uses Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic periodization” to offer an alternative narrative of world literary history that promotes “a diasporic idea of Africa before European hegemony, extending to our own contemporary moment through the works of Du Bois, Hurston, Carpentier, Walcott, Condé, and Morrison” (7-8). Frydman’s subsequent examination of the interplay among European, African American, and Caribbean authors who historically have been analyzed within different global, national, and regional frameworks is as important for the study of world literature as it is for the study of African diaspora literature, because it decenters Europe’s role in world literature, destabilizes temporal narratives of literary progress, and deconstructs reemerging binary oppositions in contemporary literary criticism. In Sounding the Break, Frydman reconsiders African American and Caribbean authors’ diverse twentieth-century literature in a world literary context. While examining early to mid-twentieth-century literature in chapters one through three, Frydman demonstrates Du Bois’s appreciation of the classics, deconstructs oral/textual binaries in Hurston’s writing, and examines Carpentier’s attempts to “break [the] Latin American dependency on European literary trends” (66). In chapters four through six on mid-to-late twentieth-century literature, Frydman emphasizes Walcott’s movement across theoretical binaries like “‘African/ European’”and“‘colonial/anticolonial’”(Dash qtd. in Frydman 92), maps Condé’s “material involvement with world narrative systems” (102), and reconsiders Morrison’s “African American vernacular culture as one node rhizomatically linked to a sprawling global array” (131). At times, Sounding the Break’s loosely chronological structure and reiteration of historical narratives and oppositional binaries that have been used to privilege Europe over Africa seem to go against the grain of Frydman’s broader theoretical aims to more fully recognize the “African diasporic textuality” of “world literature’s longue dureé” (142); however, Frydman’s nuanced comparative analyses expose significant transatlantic connections among European, African American, and Caribbean authors and genres, such as Du Bois’s modernist aesthetics, Carpentier’s baroque techniques, and Condé’s “gothic elements” (113). More specifically, the examination of Goethe’s and Du Bois’s mutual appreciation of the classics emphasizes world literature’s earlier African origins and diasporicroutes. InTheNegro(1915),DuBoisrepresentsAfricaasthe“foundation” of the classics (25), and his integration of “classical culture” (36), such as in The Book Reviews CLA JOURNAL 383 Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), unravels perceived differences between “AngloAmerican ” and “Afro-American” modernisms (39). After demonstrating world literature’s“longue durée,”such as Africa’s earlier and more foundational roles, and the modernist overlap among twentieth-century European and American authors, Frydman reconsiders oppositional binaries that reappear in literary criticism of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature (12). The comparative analyses of diverse twentieth-century texts that traditionally havebeenexaminedwithinAfricanAmericanandCaribbeanliterarycontextsrather than world literary contexts meaningfully deconstruct unevenly valued binaries that have been associated with Africa and Europe, such as orality and textuality. Relevant examples of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature’s diasporic routes and hybrid networks include the simultaneous orality and textuality of the Pentateuch in Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and the focus on “Afro-Caribbean culture”as a means to“displace Europe as the privileged center of perceptual and artistic authority” in Carpentier’s Bildungsroman, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933) (65). The fusion of folk and elite discourses in Walcott’s play, The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and the destabilization of mythical and historical binaries vis-àvis criticism of the griot in Condé’s Ségou (1984-85) also are notable examples. SoundingtheBreakinsightfullytracesworldliterature’sevolvinghistoriography and African American and Caribbean literature’s global origins, intertexts, and networks. In the conclusion, Frydman explains the importance of recognizing the global intertextuality of African American and Caribbean literature, even if texts resist a global context, such as in Morrison’s novels. By reconsidering...

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination by Paul B. Miller

Reviewed by: Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination by Paul B. Miller Max Hantel (bio) Miller, Paul B. Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010. Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination is an incredible exercise in what the author calls "Caribbean intertextuality." Describing the emergence of a distinctly Caribbean modernity, Paul B. Miller roves across the Hispanic, French, and Anglo Caribbean to, as he puts it, "call into question the relationship between our understanding of history itself and the way that it is—consciously or unconsciously— underwritten by rules of causality and historical unfolding that we have interpreted from the Enlightenment" (19). In other words, beyond a narrow historical study of the spread of Enlightenment ideals into the Caribbean, he investigates how the contradictory legacy of the Enlightenment has become fertile ground for Caribbean cultural expression. The Enlightenment is understood broadly and straightforwardly throughout the text, characterized as the combination of René Descartes cogito ("I think therefore I am") and Immanuel Kant's idea of "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity" (qtd. in Miller 3): a Cartesian subject achieving historical progress. In practical terms, this combination describes a rational individual accurately narrating the objective story of historical progress. When Enlightenment thought is mapped onto colonialism, moreover, Europe becomes the center of this progression and the home of the rational subject while the Caribbean serves as the immature and unenlightened periphery. Miller analyzes the writings of six authors, categorizing them as either modernist or postmodernist based on how they interpret the legacy of the Enlightenment. He devotes a chapter, in order, to each of the following: Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), C. L. R. James (Trinidad), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico). Carpentier represents the foundational figure of the "modern Caribbean historical imagination," so much so that Miller sometimes uses postmodern and post-Carpenterian interchangeably. Thus, the first chapter on Carpentier is crucial for the rest of the book as each author is drawn into his orbit. According to Miller, Carpentier sets up the following dichotomy: "a positive fusion or synthesis, on the one hand brought about by the convergence and exchange of European and Afro-Caribbean cultures; and on the other, a Manichean irreconcilability" (30). Miller argues that Carpentier's oeuvre is defined by a struggle with these two tendencies. He ties together two of Carpentier's works, Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933) and The Kingdom of This World (1949), based on the role of music in articulating both the divide between European and Caribbean culture and the possibility of its transcendence. Music tantalizes Carpentier, who desires synthesis but is paralyzed by a center/periphery binary between Europe and the Caribbean, because even when culturally distinct there is a universal quality to musical expression. In other words, the radical incommensurability between European and Caribbean cultural styles is seemingly bridged in form by music. Yet this formal [End Page 202] connection is inadequate since Carpentier continues to shuttle between synthesis and opposition, temporally valorizing the "prospective" American periphery against a decadent European past. In chapter 2, Miller turns to C. L. R. James's seminal historical treatise The Black Jacobins (1938). While James is "a far more engaged partisan of historical and cultural 'symbiosis'" (58) than Carpentier, he ultimately succumbs to the same paradoxes arising from the articulation of Caribbean emancipation in an Enlightenment grammar. The tragic hero of The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L'Ouverture, embodies this paradox: he is supposed to be the point of synthesis between the elite and the masses, but fails to disentangle the promise of Enlightenment ideology from the material base of the slavery economy. Toussaint's attempt to hold onto the abstract promises of the French Revolution without the violence of European imperialism collapses. Miller considers Toussaint's paralyzing hesitation "between French civilization and Haitian independence" (76) in relation to James's own inability to find a point of connection between the leader and masses. Just as Toussaint fails to institutionalize his Enlightenment ideals, because to do so would paradoxically require their violation in the form of widespread violence...

Culture, community, consciousness: The Caribbean sporting diaspora

This study shows the utility of the concept of diaspora for physical cultural studies, and particularly for thinking through sport in a Canadian setting. The capacity of diaspora theory to specify a matrix of real and imagined cross-border cultural, kinship, and social relationships makes it useful for understanding community (re)generation in sport settings. Relatively little about recreational cricket in the Caribbean and its diaspora has been documented, despite the sport’s power as a symbol of Caribbean unity. My findings indicate that a group of first-generation Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in the Greater Toronto Area use a particular form of cultural production, the sport of cricket, to generate and maintain diasporic communities, that is, cross-border interpersonal networks with other Afro-Caribbean people who remain in their nations of origin, and who are dispersed throughout the United States, elsewhere in Canada, and England. Regardless of where they play, cricket matches are “home games” that allow players and spectators to lime (hang out) and (re)generate diasporic consciousness, that is, a sense of themselves as one people through the “authentic” Afro-Caribbean environment they create. The reproduction of Afro-Caribbean culture, community, and consciousness includes conflicts with South Asian and Indo-Caribbean diasporic groups.

Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Research-to-Performance Method

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was one of the great dancer/choreographers of the 20th century. As a trained anthropologist and author, her unique contributions formed a marriage between dance and ethnology that developed the archetype of the scholar-artist. I explore her research-to-performance methodology that trail-blazed what has been analyzed by Caribbeanist VèVè Clark as "performance ethnography." Dunham explored Afro-Caribbean culture and dance, as well as her own African American culture. The essay demonstrates how she did this specially in her writings on the Jamaican Moroons and the Vodou of Haiti, recontextualizing the latter in her famous 1945 "Shango" dance work. In the process, Dunham danced the Black Atlantic well before that trope was even conceptualized, and dignified black dance forms of the Americas.

Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Culture

Students of Afro-America interpret variously the cultural materials carried by the descendants of the African slaves brought to the New World. Some see those materials primarily in terms of the struggles that slaves waged to perpetuate and protect the African heritage they carried with them into the horrors of slavery. Others view those same materials in terms of slaves’ creative capacity to synthesize new cultural forms from their ancestral knowledge, mixed with elements of Native American and European cultural legacies. Both of these positions have something in their favor, and both, carried to extremes, fail to explain what really happened.For a long time, popular (and racist) opinion held that nothing of African culture had survived in the Americas. But in the second quarter of the twentieth century, that view was sharply refuted by the oeuvre of anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. In the last 30 years, new theoretical commitments have emerged. Many can be ranged along a continuum—from nothing African to everything African—and the debate continues. On the plus side, far more data are now available than ever before. But it is as difficult as ever to accord the answers finality, if one seeks to deny either the maintenance of African heritage or the processes of culture building in the Americas.Warner-Lewis, who aims at a balanced weighting of continuity and innovation, purports “to synthesize information concerning the Central African presence in the Caribbean, and . . . analyses and identifies some of the main lineaments of the Central African cultural legacy in the region” (p. xix). To do so, she must endow her materials, on the one hand, with a coherence and intactness they may lack; on the other, she must accord every datum historical significance. Thus, for example, she advances “the proposition that the survival and/or the continued use of even one African lexical item in a West Atlantic [New World] location is evidence of an integral link . . . between the particular ethnolinguistic group—or even one individual of this group—and the practice or belief to which the term relates” (p. xxii; italics added). This working hypothesis may be provable, but it is not self-evidently true.Her 12 chapters document this argument with both lexical and ethnohistorical materials on such subjects as domestic life, rites of passage, and religion—this last at considerable length. A brief review cannot deal usefully with the data, which are copious, but a few comments may not be out of place. Language is a good place to begin, since the author gives it such weight.There is absolutely no doubt about the lexical contribution of African languages (perhaps particularly those of the Niger-Congo family) to the creole languages of the Caribbean and the European dialects spoken in the region. But the very existence of creole languages contrasts with the importance of African lexical items, because it signals the absence of an earlier lingua franca in such societies where creole languages took that role. In the case of Haitian Creole, both lexical items and also some of the syntax (and no doubt phonology) are African in origin. Yet it would be reckless or insouciant to deny that Haitian Creole evolved from a pidgin within colonial Saint-Domingue, even were one to contend that a majority of the slaves there were once Kongo speakers.This assertion does no reflect any reluctance to give Africa, its peoples and their cultures, their due. It concerns, rather, the social and linguistic conditions that the slaves in each colony had to live under and adapt to. Creole languages are “very African”; they are not “pure” anything. They were created under pressure, and though they likely began as the restricted idiom of slave and master, they became the language of slave and slave and finally of parent and child, and thereby creoles. To write this does not qualify a single whit Warner-Lewis’s arguments regarding Central African contributions to Caribbean cultures. That Central African languages lived on in the speech of Caribbean peoples is important, but the creole languages spoken there must also be recognized as the distinctive New World creation of the descendants of those Central Africans.The author wants us to recognize how much Central African material, most of it lexical, persists in Caribbean life. I, at least, both accept that this is true and believe that it is an important truth. But the book ends by heavily stressing the fluid, heterogeneous nature of culture, the ebb and flow of forms and words, the overlapping of categories, the intermingling of peoples and cultures—a veritable thesaurus of qualification that shows just how important synthesis, innovation, invention, and change have been in the creation of Afro-Caribbean cultures. After setting forth all that could possibly be attributed to Central Africa, the author leaves us to contemplate the vast social and institutional constructions within which that material is embedded.

Representations of black omen in Grace Nichol's poetry : from otherness to empowerment

From the onset of colonialism, Western scientific and philosophical discourses produced constructions of blackness aimed at depriving black people from their subjectivity as well as at providing a moral justification for their enslavement and exploitation. These constructs were mainly based on the sexualisation of black women, whose bodies and sexuality were commodified to serve both the sexual and economic demands of white slave owners. After the abolition of slavery, the myths about black womanhood were perpetuated and are currently manifested through stereotyped representations that continue to situate black women in the field of an excessive sexuality. These images are central to the maintenance of a politics of domination, as they provide an ideological legitimisation of race, class and gender oppression. For this reason, black feminists have emphasised the need to find new representations that will provide black women with positive models of identification. This article analyses three poetry collections by Afro-Caribbean poet Grace Nichols, in order to explore the diverse strategies through which she represents black women as empowered subjects of their own her stories. Nichols’s revaluation of black womanhood is mainly attained through the appropriation of black women’s bodies and sexuality as a source of power and pleasure in the context of Afro-Caribbean culture.

Healing Cultures: Art and Religion As Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora

In Healing Cultures, the editors have collected a set of articles that address the interplay between the acts, discussion, and language of healing in syncretic Afro-Caribbean cultures, and the art those cultures have produced. “Culture” here means primarily religions, which the editors regard as “powerful repositories of inner strength and cultural affirmation” (p. xvii). Seeking to show “the beneficial aspects” of Afro-Caribbean syncretism “from within the communities in question” (p. xix), they have primarily chosen authors who speak from a direct, personal perspective. Mario A. Nuñez Molina argues, in his essay on healing and espiritismo in the Puerto Rican diaspora, that the experiential approach helps the researcher achieve overlooked insights and in “collecting, analyzing, and understanding data in a way that is more consonant with the culture being studied” (p. 123). This is a common methodological theme for many of the book’s diverse contributors, who include psychologists, anthropologists, writers, and film critics. Certainly, this is true of Ester Rebecca Shapiro Rok’s highly personal account of the uses of Santería ritual for psychological healing in the exile community, an essay that emphasizes cultural mixture and dislocation, or Opal Palmer Adisa’s examination of her own work along with that Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Edna Brodber as examples of works of literature that heal black amnesia. Adisa argues that healing is possible only through confrontation with the brutal pain of the past. The need to turn the pain of Afro-Caribbeans’ history of slavery, exile, and domination into healing is another major theme of the collection. Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz finds, as a unifying idea in Caribbean film, an interpretation of the Caribbean experience as a misstep or historical aberration. Healing in films like Heile Gerima’s Sanfoka (1993), a story of Jamaican plantation slavery, comes as a result of the exorcism of the trauma of slavery through death and resurrection in the true home of Africa. In these films, magic, words, and stories serve to fix a broken Caribbean. The healing power of words and stories is a thread that runs through several other essays, including Fernández Olmos’s opening essay, “La botánic cultural: Ars Medica, Ars Poetica” (pp. 1–15), which looks at how artistic and literary depictions of a culture’s healing practices, in turn, provide healing for that culture. Karen Castelluci Cox examines healing in the novels of Julia Alvarez, where the words and stories of Vodou mysticism serve to heal the spiritual emptiness of Dominican-American women caught on the border of cultures.The struggles of people who live on cultural borders—between U.S. and Caribbean culture, between Europe and Africa, and between modern and traditional lives—are the sources of pain that must be healed in these essays. Jerry Carlson notes that Caribbean filmmakers, unable to produce their art without the technology and the resources of the metropole, have struggled “within modernity to portray a struggle with modernity” (p. 150). But this is also true of the Vodou practitioners in Karen McCarthy Brown’s essay, “Afro-Caribbean Healing: A Haitian Case Study” (pp. 43–68). Brown examines how Vodou adapts as it moves from rural areas to the urban environment, forced to grapple with the unraveling of large extended families whose members are drawn into a deeply impoverished version of the modern world. Their struggle and pains come from broken promises and failed obligations, either between humans and the loa, between individuals, or between individuals and the community. These failures are made more common by modern life. Healing is found through attention to these relationships, and the power to heal is found in knowledge and experience, expressed through words, stories, dance, and community ritual.Most of the remaining articles examine those words, symbols, and rituals directly, including a translation of an excerpt from Lydia Cabrera’s La medicina popular en Cuba (1984), and Anna Wexler’s interview with the Boston Santero Steve Quintana on the use of dolls in Afro-Cuban religion, in which he discusses how the care of dolls and their associated spirits is connected to illness and healing. The book as whole is a diverse mélange of styles and disciplinary approaches. It opens with a poem by the Trinidadian author LeRoy Clarke, and Adisa presents some of her analysis in verse. Fernández Olmos, discussing Lydia Cabrera’s El monte (1954), sees in its eclectic style a manifestation of the intellectual style of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. She and Paravisini-Gebert have brought a similar philosophy to collecting the essays in this volume. Some of the authors in this collection had to stretch somewhat to fit the theme of healing, such as Carlson with “The Film Cure: Responses to Modernity in the Cinemas of the Caribbean” (pp. 149–64), but the result is a useful interdisciplinary presentation of current work by scholars and artists on the interplay of art, religion, and healing in the Caribbean.

Building a National Focus for Student Exchange with Africa: The National Consortium for Study in Africa

The National Consortium for Study in Africa (NCSA) grew out of a concern about the paucity of high-quality studyabroad opportunities in Africa for North American undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Africa is the second largest continent in geographic size and the ancestral home of 15 percent of the U.S. population, a demographic segment that has lived in the United States longer than most European immigrants. As a result, much of American art, music, language, and culture has derived from Africa and the AfroCaribbean cultures. Africa also is an important and growing source of U.S. trade, which is larger than that of all the Commonwealth of Independent States of eastern Europe. In spite of the country's prominence, less than 4 percent of North American students who study abroad enroll for study in Africa.

Building a National Focus for Student Exchange with Africa: The National Consortium for Study in Africa

The National Consortium for Study in Africa (NCSA) grew out of a concern about the paucity of high-quality study-abroad opportunities in Africa for North American undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Africa is the second largest continent in geographic size and the ancestral home of 15 percent of the U.S. population, a demographic segment that has lived in the United States longer than most European immigrants. As a result, much of American art, music, language, and culture has derived from Africa and the Afro-Caribbean cultures. Africa also is an important and growing source of U.S. trade, which is larger than that of all the Commonwealth of Independent States of eastern Europe. In spite of the country’s prominence, less than 4 percent of North American students who study abroad enroll for study in Africa.

Names and naming in Afro-Caribbean cultures

Compares naming practices in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean and in Afro-American culture. Author asks how one is to interpret multiple identities and the parallel practice of taking over the names of the powerful as is common in both Afro-creole and Afro-American culture. He argues that Afro-creole culture is not a culture of resistance but an oppositional culture. It is a subaltern culture in part derived from a dominant culture which it can only oppose from within.

A MAYA WOMAN REFLECTS UPON GOSPEL AND CULTURE

Introduction Allow me to introduce myself. I am the product of four cultures. My ancestors were Mayas and Aztecs, two great races of people who have inhabited Mexico and Central America for countless centuries. My country, Belize, has an AfroCaribbean culture, because it was a British colony for many years. So, English is my first language. However, I chose to do my early theological studies in Guatemala and Costa Rica, where Spanish is the dominant tongue. In fact, up until now, all of my preaching has been in Spanish. This is a very special occasion for me because it is my first sermon in English, and -- of all things -- through an interpreter, to a group of Korean Christians! Talk about intercultural communication! It is also my first time to preach in the USA - although, eighteen years ago, I worked in a Spanish-speaking congregation in St Croix, Virgin Islands, which is a US territory. What a rich gospel we have, incarnated in so many different cultures! I understand that this Baptist congregation represents the marriage (literally and culturally) of Korean and Anglo families. This union of Korean and North American cultures is, perhaps, a paradigm of the unity of Christ's gospel with the different cultures in which it has been proclaimed. None of the cultures that have enriched my life are rich in money. Your cultures and my cultures are full of symbols and understandings of the richness of Christ. Every people express their spirituality and respond to their daily struggles in unique cultural ways. I am eager to learn more about your culture and how you experience God as Korean Christians. Would you allow me to share with you something about my own indigenous culture? Jesus and the Maya people It is important for us today to understand who Jesus is within each of the myriad of cultures -- including my own culture -- where he has revealed himself. The Maya culture developed over thousands of years. Very early in their history (probably in southern Guatemala) they discovered a grass with a tasty grain and it became their staple food; over time, they were able to breed the maize that is now the basic food of millions of people all over the world. In the fourth century A.D., when Europe was living in the Dark Ages, great Maya city states began to emerge in the lowlands of southern Mexico. They reclaimed swamps for large scale agriculture and constructed huge pyramids. They developed a sophisticated writing system, tracked the stars and worked out a calendar with an accuracy that has only been surpassed by atomic clocks. For social and ecological reasons that are only now beginning to emerge, in the tenth century this civilization suddenly collapsed all over the region. Meanwhile, new religious centres, influenced by invaders from the north, arose in the Yucatan peninsula and the Guatemalan highlands, and lasted until a century after the arrival of the Spaniards. While they worshipped many gods, they believed that these were all but manifestations of the one invisible creator God, who is both male and female. Their Council Book, the Pop Vuh, and other surviving literature contain evidence of this and of their hope of a coming messiah. This explains why, when the Spaniards invaded them in the sixteenth century, they surrendered so easily. They thought that the blond and blue-eyed invaders were divine messengers! The Spanish missionaries sent to evangelize them, despite learning their language and appreciating their culture, did everything possible to destroy that culture because they considered it diabolical. Today, the Maya people, for the most part, are landless, jobless and discriminated against. During the past three decades, the Guatemalan army has massacred thousands of indigenous peoples. But they have something that cannot be taken away from them, their faith in God. Covered by a veneer of Catholic popular religiosity, the indigenous peoples of the Americas continued worshipping their multiform God in Christian churches, in dense jungle clearings and upon isolated mountain tops. …

Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis

Part 1 English Patriarchal hierarchy, African bondage: Africans in English patriarchy Afro-Caribbean culture, Euro-Caribbean institutions. Part 2 In pursuit of respectability: the Methodist society in a free society the struggle for recognition home is where you leave it - paradoxes of identity the demise of the local - the background for a global community the global community global culture, island identity.

The struggle for respectability: Methodism and Afro-Caribbean culture on 19th century Nevis

The relationship between the English Methodists and the Afro-Caribbean population was one informed by different cultural frameworks as well as different class interests. The author examines the missionizing activities in the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular Nevis.

‘Witnesses in spite of themselves’: Reconstructing Afro—Caribbean culture in the Danish West Indian archives

Abstract In his geographical study of Denmark published in 1855–57, E. Erslev regrets that he cannot provide significant information on the Afro-Caribbean population in the Danish West Indies: ‘In addition to our description of the way in which the colored inhabitants are occupied on the plantations, it would have been of interest if we had been able to offer an account of the many other distinctive characteristics of their life; but as far as the author is aware, we lack any form of literary aid to this end. If somebody who is travelling to or staying in the West Indies feels encouraged to describe the colored people and their domestic conditions, he would thereby help fulfill a palpable need’.1