African Identities

This book addresses the conceptual difficulties and political contestations surrounding the applicability of the term "African-Canadian". In the midst of this contested terrain, the volume focuses on first generation, Black Continental Africans who have immigrated to Canada in the last four decades, and have traceable genealogical links to the continent.

Cutting across countries, genres, and time periods, this volume explores topics ranging from hip hop’s influence on Maasai identity in current day Tanzania to jazz in Bulawayo during the interwar years, using music to tell a larger story about the cultures and societies of Africa.

This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference. Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by: * Toni Morrison * Alice Walker * Gloria Naylor * Ngugi Wa Thiong'o * Chinua Achebe * and V.S. Naipaul. For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.

This volume is the second in the series, Identity? theory, politics, history. It includes Neville Alexander's important study of the link between language and identity in South Africa.

Converging Identities is a volume of sixteen essays analyzing the issues of blackness and identity of the African Diaspora in global perspective, but focusing on the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Given the historical factors that prompted Africans to populate different parts of the world, the subject of blackness as a form of identity becomes relevant. In modern times, blackness and identity are popular subject matters in view of the historic election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America in 2008. Converging Identities provides a stimulating and enlightening perspective to blackness and identity of the African Diaspora. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "This book investigates the role of Africans in the development of host communities in which they settled, with their attendant antithetical consequences including loss of their African identity or Blackness. Sophisticated both in scope and content of analyses, this book will be invaluable to academic and non-academic audiences on African Diaspora correlated to the notion of identity formation and crisis ethno-cultural representation." -- Apollos Okwuchi Nwauwa, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Africana Studies, Bowling Green State University "Converging Identities is an invaluable contribution to the scholarly output on the Black/Africana Experience. It is culturally relevant for the citizens of modern Africa and historically pertinent to the ongoing reassessment of black ontology beyond the African continent." -- BioDun J. Ogundayo, Ph.D., Associate Professor of French & Comparative Literature, University of Pittsburgh, Bradford Campus "Converging Identities is a curiously sensitive and stimulating collection of essays that vividly capture the challenges and opportunities of the contemporary African Diaspora in the Americas in the realm of race, cultures, identity formations and transformations." -- Emmanuel M. Mbah, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, The City University of New York, College of Staten Island "One of the key features of this book is its accessibility: the language is clear and chapters are neatly organized by broad themes according to geographical regions. Additionally, topics covered in sections are vast (from mental health to race films in France), and thus readers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and interests will find something to enjoy." -- Portia Owusu, African Studies Quarterly

Choreographies of African Identities traces interconnected interpretative frameworks around and about the National Ballet of Senegal. Using the metaphor of a dancing circle Castaldi's arguments cover the full spectrum of performance, from production to circulation and reception. Castaldi first situates the reader in a North American theater, focusing on the relationship between dancers and audiences as that between black performers and white spectators. She then examines the work of the National Ballet in relation to Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude ideology and cultural politics. Finally, the author addresses the circulation of dances in the streets, discotheques, and courtyards of Dakar, drawing attention to women dancers' occupation of the urban landscape.

This title was first published in 2003. Aimed at examining contemporary debates and issues which are at the cutting edge of the social sciences, Pal Ahluwalia and Abebe Zegeye have put together a book on subjects of critical importance to the African condition. A combination of empirical and theoretical materials, this text introduces new perspectives.

The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge. After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.