Africanisms In American Culture Second Edition

A revised and expanded edition of a groundbreaking text.

A revised and expanded edition of a groundbreaking text.

Users looking for authoritative and comprehensive information about black history, figures and accomplishments now have a defining and current reference to address their needs. The second edition of the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History is a much-needed expansion of the 1996 classic and its 2000 supplement. As with the earlier publications, the second edition is aimed at high school and college students, as well as the general reader. Whereas the first edition focused almos exclusively on the United States, this new set identifies and addresses broad themes critical to understanding the texture of the cultures, achievements, challenges and comprise North America, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Readers can find comparative analyses of social movements, languages, religions and family structures in the context of an interdisciplinary framework that fills a substantial gap in studies of this genre. While many articles from the original set have updated content and bibliographies, almost half of the second edition is composed of completely new scholarship.

American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.

Contains 2,200 entries that provide information about African-American history, arranged alphabetically, and featuring a large number of biographies, as well as information about places, events, historical eras, legal cases, cultural achievements, professions, and sports.

The African Heritage of American English provides a detailed compilation of Africanisms, identified linguistically, from a range of sources: folklore, place names, food culture, aesthetics, religion, loan words. Presenting a comprehensive accounting of African words retained from Bantu, Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass examine the Bantu vocabulary content of the Gullah dialect of the Sea Islands; Black names in the United States; Africanisms of Bantu origin in Black English; Bantu place names in nine southern states; and Africanisms in contemporary American English. These linguistic retentions reflect the cultural patterns of groups imported to the United States, the subsequent dispersion of these groups, and their continuing influence on the shaping of American culture.

For review see: Daniel J. Crowley, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 1 & 2 (1996); p. 188-190.

How were blacks in American slavery formed, out of a multiplicity of African ethnic peoples, into a single people? In this major study of Afro-American culture, Sterling Stuckey, a leading thinker on black nationalism for the past twenty years, explains how different African peoples interacted during the nineteenth century to achieve a common culture. He finds that, at the time of emancipation, slaves were still overwhelmingly African in culture, a conclusion with profound implications for theories of black liberation and for the future of race relations in America. By examining anthropological evidence about Central and West African cultural traditions--Bakongo, Ibo, Dahomean, Mendi and others--and exploring the folklore of the American slave, Stuckey has arrived at an important new cross-cultural analysis of the Pan-African impulse among slaves that contributed to the formation of a black ethos. He establishes, for example, the centrality of an ancient African ritual--the Ring Shout or Circle Dance--to the black American religious and artistic experience. Black nationalist theories, the author points out, are those most in tune with the implication of an African presence in America during and since slavery. Casting a fresh new light on these ideas, Stuckey provides us with fascinating profiles of such nineteenth century figures as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglas. He then considers in detail the lives and careers of W. E. B. Dubois and Paul Robeson in this century, describing their ambition that blacks in American society, while struggling to end racism, take on roles that truly reflected their African heritage. These concepts of black liberation, Stuckey suggests, are far more relevant to the intrinsic values of black people than integrationist thought on race relations. But in a final revelation he concludes that, with the exception of Paul Robeson, the ironic tendency of black nationalists has been to underestimate the depths of African culture in black Americans and the sophistication of the slave community they arose from.