Historiographical Examination Of The African Diaspora

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject African Studies - African diaspora, grade: A, University of Education (University of Education Winneba), language: English, abstract: This essay analyses the historiography of the African Diaspora with regards to its conceptualization, time and space of its emergence. It seeks to examine various selected historical works on the history of the African Diaspora with the aim of providing a meaningful analysis of the trend of historians' interpretations of the concept. It pays much attention on the historical production about the Black Atlantic Diaspora that predominantly emerged out of the Atlantic interaction of Euro-America with Africa during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST). The essay however, shares common concerns with historiographies of other African Diasporic streams in general.

This Manuscript is an analysis of the African Diaspora. It will define the African Diaspora and how the concepts behind the term came to be socially and historically engineered. The African diaspora is then placed into a broader historical context where the diverse, global, and overlapping histories of Africa's ancient-ongoing diasporas will be explored. In particular, themes of injustice, agency, resistance, and diversity (regarding people, diasporas, and experiences) will feature heavily. Through this exploration, this manuscript will interrogate dominating narratives regarding African diaspora-related discourse, seeking to address prevailing ideas that inadequately capture the true complexity and nuance of the subject. It does so to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter while lining out a more holistic approach to thinking about the very nature of "diaspora." Finally, this manuscript will analyze the present circumstances of the African diaspora, bringing into conversation a progressively global and connected world.

As Africans and descendants of slaves have sought to expand an understanding of their history, focus on the African diaspora--the global dispersal of a people and their culture--has increased. African studies have assumed a prominent place in historical scholarship, and a growing number of non-African scholars has helped revise a discipline established over several decades. The six contributions in this volume were compiled as a result of the thirtieth Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The contributors, nationally recognized in the field, represent a collaborative analysis of the African diaspora from African and non-African perspectives. Joseph E. Harris discusses how the African diaspora influences the economies, politics, and social dynamics of both the homeland and the host country. Alusine Jalloh reconstructs the mercantile activities of the Fula in colonial Sierra Leone. Joseph E. Inikori argues that slavery and serfdom in medieval Europe provide greater insights into precolonial Africa than do standard New World comparisons. Colin A. Palmer examines the power relationships that undergirded American slavery in order to better understand the enslaved. Douglas B. Chambers reveals the enduring influence of Africanisms in the historical development of Afro-Virginian slave culture. And Dale T. Graden looks at African slavery in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil between 1848 and 1856, focusing on the Bahian elite and their response to slave resistance.

The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans. Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counter narratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.

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.

Captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience.

This volume establishes new perspectives on African American history. The author discusses a wide range of issues and themes for understanding and analyzing African American history, the 20th century African American historical enterprise, and the teaching of African American history for the 21st century.