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From the historical movements of enslaved Africans to the Americas to newer migrations of Africans to spaces like Belgium and France, experiences of blackness on a global stage reflect themes of negotiation, persecution, isolation, unification, remembrance, and much more. Yet, it is impossible to minimize the complex experiences that make up the African diaspora throughout the world, as diasporic communities face a range of struggles, specifically related to the politics of identity and connections to the continent of Africa itself. This book is thus a timely and much-needed exploration of the intricate nature of culture and life in the African diaspora. It examines identities, collectivitie...
Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is also available on this website. From the historical movements of enslaved Africans to the Americas to newer migrations of Africans to spaces like Belgium and France, experiences of blackness on a global stage reflect themes of negotiation, persecution, isolation, unification, remembrance, and much more. Yet, it is impossible to minimize the complex experiences that make up the African diaspora throughout the world, as diasporic communities face a range of struggles, specifically related to the politics of identity and connections to the continent of Africa itself. This book is thus a timely and muc...
Essays debunking the notion that contemporary America is a colorblind society. More than half a century after the civil rights era of the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, American society is often characterized as postracial. In other words, that the country has moved away from prejudice based on skin color and we live in a colorblind society. The reality, however, is the opposite. African Americans continue to face both explicit and latent discriminations in housing, healthcare, education, and every facet of their lives. Recent cases involving law enforcement officers shooting unarmed Black men also attest to the reality: the problem of the twenty-first century is still the problem of the color line. In Race Still Matters, contributors drawn from a wide array of disciplines use multidisciplinary methods to explore topics such as Black family experiences, hate crimes, race and popular culture, residual discrimination, economic and occupational opportunity gaps, healthcare disparities, education, law enforcement issues, youth culture, and the depiction of Black female athletes. The volume offers irrefutable evidence that race still very much matters in the United States today.
"In this collection of three essays, internationally renowned tenor Ian Bostridge explores his relation to the performance of Western classical vocal music through the lens of gender, politics, or the ultimate paradoxical grounding of identity, death. As a performer who needs to negotiate between his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage or in the concert hall, Bostridge asks questions about how the complex identity of a piece of music was creatively configured by composers at particular historical moments, and how today's performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge guides his readers through an exploration of t...
Exploring issues of disability culture, activism, and policy across the African continent, this volume argues for the recognition of African disability studies as an important and emerging interdisciplinary field.
A captivating account of an interracial jazz opera that took apartheid South Africa by storm and marked a turning point in the nation's cultural history.
In The Epic of Juan Latino, Elizabeth R. Wright tells the story of Renaissance Europe's first black poet and his epic poem on the naval battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen (The Song of John of Austria). Piecing together the surviving evidence, Wright traces Latino's life in Granada, Iberia's last Muslim metropolis, from his early clandestine education as a slave in a noble household to his distinguished career as a schoolmaster at the University of Granada. When intensifying racial discrimination and the chaos of the Morisco Revolt threatened Latino's hard-won status, he set out to secure his position by publishing an epic poem in Latin verse, the Austrias Carmen, that would demonstrate his mastery of Europe's international literary language and celebrate his own African heritage. Through Latino's remarkable, hitherto untold story, Wright illuminates the racial and religious tensions of sixteenth-century Spain and the position of black Africans within Spain's nascent empire and within the emerging African diaspora.
This book "explores pressing social and political issues such as racial identity, environmental devastation, human trafficking, and political violence through the lens of novels of African migration. [It] details how authors such as Chika Unigwe, Chris Abani, Dinaw Mengestu, In Koli Jean Bofane, Boubacar Boris Diop, and others develop 'the migratory imagination': the creative means mobilized within their novels to expose the reader to contemporary social issues. Drawing on and synthesizing a multitude of theoretical frameworks including ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, genre studies, Black studies, paratextual reading, and political economy, the book argues for the flexibility of the migration novel as a genre"--
The first major history of photography from coastal East Africa The ports of the Swahili coast—Zanzibar and Mombasa among them—have long been dynamic centers of trade where diverse peoples, ideas, and materials converge. With the arrival of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, these predominantly Muslim coastal communities cultivated and transformed the medium. The Surface of Things examines the complex maritime dynamics that shaped the photography of coastal Africa, exploring the pleasure and power of beautiful things and the ways people and their pictures transcended the boundaries of the colonial world. Immersing readers in the globally interconnected networks of eastern Africaâ...
Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century.