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As a major origin of emigrants to the western hemisphere, the African continent has seen its share of both forced and volunteer emigration. During the second immigration phase of the African diaspora, most Africans viewed the West as a place of opportunity, where an education could be obtained to assist in political and economic advancement in their homelands. However, the sense of optimism that accompanied the new immigrants soon waned as their hope for the eventual voyage home dimmed: deteriorating economic conditions and political instability created by the aftermath of colonization ensured not only permanent exile from their native lands, but also the arrival of millions of others fleeing the same economic hardships, and in many instances, political instability.This anthology of poems and personal narratives by writers from Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zimbabwe will make readers laugh, cry, smile, and wonder at the life of the immigrant. This collection reflects the blend and clash of cultures, and the pain and triumphs. Residing in various parts of the world, the United States, Netherlands, Wales, Britain, France, and Qatar, these writers give voice to the deep, but often forgotten salient effects of immigration on the African people who have left their family, community, and land of origin. These texts are their journeys home. ... Read more

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Dance Hall:From Slave Ship to Ghetto
I found this book to be well organized, accessible, refreshing and rewarding.The theoretical framework offered in the first chapter was comprehensive and engaging.This book, although rooted in the Jamaican experience, provides a framework that helps us to understand dance hall history and contemporary practice within the Caribbean and the larger Black Atlantic.As a Guyanese, this work has helped me to connect Guyana's Old Time Dance Halls,"Big Girl fetes" and contemporary manifestations such as the Plaisance Line Top Lime, and the Sunday afternoon Sea Wall lime with this wider "dance hall geography." ... Read more

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mediocre book on a great subject
I'm glad that another lesbian & gay black anthology exists, but I wasn't particularly impressed with this book.I thought Hemphill's "Brother to Brother" and even "Afrekete" were much better books.Maybe due to the Canadian-British-diasporic scope, this book dealt with blacks in far whiter milieux and seemed a tad white-washed.Notice how the book has "queer" in the title when almost no African-American gay text does.I think the editors did not have much vision with this collection either.It's not terrible, but it could have been better.

Makeda Silvia is to dread with this anthology
Maka: Diasporic Juks (*Sister Vision Press) is a long awaited and greatlyover due collection of Black writings. It's an assembly of grand, new andestablished, fiction and nonfiction, voices fromAfro-Americans and BlackCanadians. "Maka", coming from Canada, a country who does notafford it's most passionate to speak and expose their rage and creativity,offers, for the first time, an insight into the thoughts and testamony ofBlack Canadian's 'in the life. They are a welcomed inclusion.

It is amust read, if only for Lawrence Braithwaite's short story "BAGGYTROUSERS" (whose previous novel Wigger tackled the hellish interiormonologue of contemporary youth and race).Braithwaite tells a twistedstory, in street argot, of two Black teenagers "stuck" in a briefand brutal urban love affair.

Maka: Diasporic Juks, comes through all theway inspiring insight, intellgence, sexuality, sensuality and dread. A mustread and great next step forward in the tradition of the late EssexHemphill's Brother to Brother (Alyson Press). Ms Silvera and Ms Douglas,inspire dreams and action with this collection of thought, tales andtestamony. ... Read more

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Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of acollective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work ofa number of black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how ashared consciousness, or "third sight," is rooted in both pre-and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a richoral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities,creating an alternate philosophical "worldsense" linking thoseof African descent across space and time.

Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes "culture"and maintaining that neglected strains in Négritude discourse providea crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folkpractices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, Johnexamines the diasporic principles in the work of the Négritude writersLéon Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. She traces themanifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writingfrom the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbeandiaspora in the United States. The authors discussed include JamaicaKincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, PauleMarshall, and Edouard Glissant, among others. John argues that, byincorporating what she calls "folk groundings"—such as poems,folktales, proverbs, and songs—into their work, Afro-Caribbeanwriters invoke a psychospiritual consciousness which combines old andnew strategies for addressing the ongoing postcolonial struggle. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from African American Review, published by African American Review on December 22, 2007. The length of the article is 1632 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Michael A. Gomez, ed. Diasporic Africa: A Reader.(Book review)
Author: Lauren Hauptman
Publication: African American Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2007
Publisher: African American Review
Volume: 41Issue: 4Page: 809(3)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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This work examines the shortcomings of contemporary approaches to multiculturalism by analyzing the relationship between diasporas and more sessile communities. Most existing discussions on the subject do not utilize the experience of diasporas in their research. This book critically assesses two contemporary approaches to multiculturalism, namely Liberalism 1 and 2. These two understandings of multiculturalism are taken from Michael Walzer, - one where the state is seen as a neutral arbiter between culturally different groups and the other where the state is seen as identifying with one or several cultural groups. The central argument forwarded here is that although Liberalism 1 and 2 are commendable approaches to the management of difference in a polity, they are unable to secure long-term inter-group harmony owing to the static understanding of identity that underpins both approaches. Diasporas have been specifically selected for the examination of their relation to more sessile communities. This work looks at the growing number of diasporas and explores the traditionally negative connotation of the word.The three examples analyzed in the study are within the Chinese, African and Jewish diasporas. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1992 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1679 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1918 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Critical Arts, published by Critical Arts Projects on January 1, 2003. The length of the article is 6619 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Editorial: whose diaspora is this anyway? Continental Africans trying on and troubling diasporic identity.(Editorial)
Author: Handel Kashope Wright
Publication: Critical Arts (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2003
Publisher: Critical Arts Projects
Volume: 17Issue: 1-2Page: 1(16)

Article Type: Editorial

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 5495 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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The first book on the history of black dandyism, Slaves to Fashion examines the pivotal role that style has played in the politics and aesthetics of African diasporic identity formation. The figure of the black dandy first emerged in eighteenth-century England as an attempt to control the representation of Africans by imposing upon domestic slaves luxurious uniforms intended to flaunt their masters' wealth. These uniforms were soon manipulated by those who wore them, initiating a struggle between master and slave in which style emerged as a primary means of self-expression for blacks. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Monica L. Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy's signature tools--clothing, gesture, and wit--to break down limiting identity markers and propose new, fluid ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world.

Miller draws from literature, film, photography, print ads, and music to generate a cultural history of the black dandy, ranging from Mungo Macaroni, a freed slave and well-known dandy on the London social scene in the eighteenth century, to the ways that contemporary visual artists represent the black dandy as an emblem of black cosmopolitanism. Along the way, she addresses the role of the black dandy in nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois's use of the dandy to investigate the relationship between black masculinity and cultural nationalism, and black dandyism in the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. With masterful aplomb worthy of its iconographic subject, Slaves to Fashion analyzes and celebrates the black dandy as a cultural figure in the Atlantic diaspora. ... Read more

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How black people, once slaves to fashion, have made fashion their slave
"Slaves to Fashion" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Miller's book interview ran here as cover feature on October 16, 2009. ... Read more

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What and who constitutes world history? What makes a history a "world" history? What is the "world" with which world history is concerned? Can another "world" be considered?Scholars of African birth or descent are acutely absent in the writing of and debates concerning world history, inept when it comes to the foregoing questions, and invisible in the production of worldly historical knowledge.Once known as the continent without history or historical consciousness, Africa and its intellectuals represent a much larger segment of the marginalized intellectual world. In fact, the African Network in Global History, founded in 2009 at the University of Ilorin (Nigeria), is the clearest evidence of African scholars' tardy entry into a world history discourse, as well as support for studies in world history that address Africa and the world as seen from African perspectives.We can only begin to answer the above questions when the former peoples and places without history rewrite world history.Certainly, the world should constitute and make a "world history" driven by perspectives on the world rather than a Eurasian world of perspectives.In the past three decades, writers of world history have focused comparatively on historical themes and recurring processes.In their history and traditions, writers of world history and their past exemplars share more than a Eurasian origin; the older traditions modeled by Herodotus of ancient Greece and Sima Qian of China viewed the world through the superiority of their own societies, and current European or white historians honed their views in the context of imperialism and colonialism.Implicit in those traditions is that world history research and writing began when Europeans discovered the world outside of Europe. Consequently, formerly unknown peoples of Africa and the Americas had to fit within Christian frames of history that remained until the twentieth century and, in some cases, the twenty-first century.Reading the World combines the strength of recent scholarship and research-based monographs, the coherency of single authorship, and the presentation and somewhat narrative style of textbooks. Reading the World provides an intellectually stimulating, authoritative, and engaging history that is both concise and global in scope, and offers a readable introduction to a challenging topic.Reading the World also aims to challenge the way readers think about the histories of people and places of the globe and how they and others might interpret or write their own "world" histories.This book does not attempt a "grand narrative" or provide a recipe textbook with prefabricated questions, test banks, audiovisual supplements, and indigestible sequences of "facts" and historical events packaged in such a way that you think less and forgo your creativity.Rather, Reading the World is but one of what should be a number of world history monographs representing an integral contribution from the historically marginalized in worldly historical knowledge and its production, engaging in the unfinished and fascinating conversation of a composite world history. ... Read more

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Examines the institutional impact of welfare reform on community-based organizations. Rather than treating children and individuals of families as the units for analysing the effects of public policy, Jennings uses a case-study approach involving three low-income neighbourhoods in Massachusetts. ... Read more

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Unknown Tongues examines the social and economic factors of northern industrialization, social reform, and black nationalism, all of which undergirded black women’s political consciousness during the decades before the American Civil War. The linkages between black women’s roles in the "culture of resistance" in slave communities and their transformations in the urban market economy fueled the development of black women’s political consciousness.As community activists and then as abolitionists, black urban women organized and protested against slavery, racism, sexism, and its attendant ills. Driven by market forces of nascent capitalism, black women created broad- based protest responses to the white power structure. Unknown Tongues explores the material realities that underpinned black women’s political development as well as the transformative stages of their political consciousness and activity. ... Read more