Book Description
Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work of a number of Black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or “third sight,” is rooted in both pre- and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical “worldsense” linking those of African descent across space and time.

Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the negritude writers Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Edouard Glissant, among others. John argues that by incorporating what she calls folk groundings—such as poems, folktales, proverbs, and songs—into their work, Afro-Caribbean writers invoke a psychospiritual consciousness which combines old and new strategies for addressing the ongoing postcolonial struggle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

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

Book Description
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

Book Description
In Haunting Capital, Hershini Young sets out to re-theorize the African diaspora "so that the concept becomes unintelligible without an understanding of gender as a constitutive element." Young uses the historically injured bodies of black women, as represented in novels by black women, to talk about colonialism, gender, race, memory and haunting.

Haunting Capital departs from traditional trauma studies, which stress individual wounding and psychotherapeutic models. Instead, Young explores the notion of injury as a collective wounding, resulting from the trauma of capitalistic regimes such as slavery and colonialism. She also introduces the idea of the ghost to her discussion of collective injury, where it functions not only on theoretical and metaphorical levels, but also by invoking African cosmologies in which ghosts are ancestral beings with a real spiritual presence.

More specifically, Young insists on the contemporary reality of African nations and eschews the presentation of Africa as a vague, undifferentiated point of origin that characterizes many other studies of the African diaspora. Her reading of African contemporary novels by women, alongside African American and Caribbean novels, works to show the African diaspora as haunted by similar, though different, issues of gendered and racialized violence. ... Read more

Book Description

"These 13 well-written scholarly essays are an eclectic compilation covering disparate topics, places, and time periods relating to the African Diaspora. . . . Recommended."
—Choice

”Makes a fine introduction to recent scholarship on the African Diaspora, from the slave trade and the geographic dispersal of African people, to the modern conceptualization of the Diaspora as an imagined homeland.”
—International Journal of African Historical Studies

”Thus this book will be fruitful for ongoing debates on Diaspora and transnationalism and is indispensable for anyone interested in African Diaspora studies.”
—Journal of African History

"This sparkling mosaic of thought from the African Diaspora redraws the boundaries of relevant scholarship to the benefit of a wide array of students and scholars. A greatly needed volume."
—P. Sterling Stuckey, Presidential Chair and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, University of California at Riverside

"A valuable contribution to a vision of the African diaspora as intricately linked to specific histories, cultures and societies ofAfrica, both in the era of slavery and within the context of pan-Africanism."
—Paul E. Lovejoy, Director, Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, York University, Toronto

Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora.

The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.

Product Description
Created at the crossroads of slavery, migration, and exile, and comprising a global population, the black diaspora is a diverse space of varied histories, experiences, and goals. Likewise, black diasporic film tends to focus on the complexities of transnational identity, which oscillates between similarity and difference and resists easy categorization. In Contact Zones author Sheila J. Petty addresses a range of filmmakers, theorists, and issues in black diasporic cinema, highlighting their ongoing influences on contemporary artistic and theoretical discourses. ... Read more

Product Description
The Borders In Us All: New Approaches to Global Disaporic Societies is a collection of scholarly essay.This volume is unique in its approach to historical Diasporas in that it explores some of the cross curents within Diasporic communties in Africa, Asia, latin American and the United States providing new insight into America's new ethnic majorities.In eighteen chapters the authors examined the historical, political dynamnics, and the language/literariy traditions and the arts and creative expressions of several ethnic and global Diasporic communities. ... Read more