African Connections

African Connections
Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780759102590

From the exodus of early modern humans to the growth of African diasporas, Africa has had a long and complex relationship with the outside world. More than a passive vessel manipulated by external empires, the African experience has been a complex mix of internal geographic, environmental, sociopolitical and economic factors, and regular interaction with outsiders. Peter Mitchell attempts to outline these factors over the long period of modern human history, to find their commonalities and development over time. He examines African interconnections through Egypt and Nubia with the Near East, through multiple Indian Ocean trading systems, through the trans-Saharan trade, and through more recent incursion of Europeans. The African diaspora is also explored for continuities and resistance to foreign domination. Commonalities abound in the African experience, as do complexities of each individual period and interrelationship. Mitchell's sweeping analysis of African connections place the continent in context of global prehistory and history. The book should be of interest not only to Africanists, but to many other archaeologists, historians, geographers, linguists, social scientists and their students.

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Luisa Marcela Ossa
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498587097

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although their journeys started from different points of origin, spanning two separate oceans, their point of contact in this hemisphere brought them together under a hegemonic system that would treat these seemingly disparate continental ancestries as one. Historically, an overwhelming majority of people of African and Asian descent were brought to the Americas as sources of labor to uphold the plantation, agrarian economies leading to complex relationships and interactions. The contributions to this collection examine various aspects of these connections. The authors bring to the forefront perspectives regarding history, literature, art, and religion and engage how they are manifested in these Afro-Asian relationships and interactions. They investigate what has received little academic engagement outside the acknowledgement that there are groups who are of African and Asian descent. In regard to their relationships with the dominant Europeanized center, references to both groups typically only view them as singular entities. What this interdisciplinary collection presents is a more cohesive approach that strives to place them at the center together and view their relationships in their historical contexts.

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2015-07-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0679645985

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Author: Louis Chude-Sokei
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1328841588

A gutting, gorgeous memoir of a pan-African childhood that tracks the author's migrations from the short-lived African nation known as Biafra, to Jamaica, to Los Angeles' harshest streets

Connecting with My African Roots

Connecting with My African Roots
Author: Carmen Barclay Subryan Ph.D.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1664175245

This book is not only about connection but also about discovery. As an adult, through my years or reading and research, I became aware of the theories revolving around Pangea (Pangaea), the super continent existing over 300 million years ago that included Africa and South America. The theory is that it broke apart to form the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean, as well as many islands. If one looks at a globe or a map, one would see that Africa and South America fit together like a hand in a glove, and if one believes the theory, then these countries share a common ancestry. So even though what became known as The Middle Passage separated the two continents, the people undoubtedly retain the DNA of those ancestors that creates a forever connection between what was and what is. For this reason, the picture of Pangea on my book cover is exceedingly important.

China's Second Continent

China's Second Continent
Author: Howard W. French
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2014-05-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385351682

A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

Pan-African Connections

Pan-African Connections
Author: Carole Boyce Davies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Pan-Africanism
ISBN: 9781569026939

Pan-African Connections brings to the reader a combination of Reflections and Testimonies from writers, politicians, activists, colleagues; with essays on intellectual activism, the building of Pan-African institutions and the voices of women in Panafricanism. Stories abound from writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Anyang' Nyong'o about Locksley Edmondson, who is featured here, who like Walter Rodney, lived and worked on the African continent physically, but also engaged it politically, culturally and intellectually in teaching and research. The lives and work of these scholars embodied precisely the bringing together of African, Caribbean and African-American Studies in the intellectual arena. Through this generation of intellectual/activists, the rubric of Panfricanism remains one of the key areas of academic and political inquiry in Africana Studies.

Afropessimism

Afropessimism
Author: Frank B. Wilderson III
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1631496158

“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post

Creating African Fashion Histories

Creating African Fashion Histories
Author: JoAnn McGregor
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0253060133

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice? From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.

Connecting Continents

Connecting Continents
Author: Kenneth G. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000297519

This volume draws together richly textured and deeply empirical accounts of rice and how its cultivation in the Carolina low country stitch together a globe that maps colonial economies, displacement, and the creative solutions of enslaved people conscripted to cultivate its grain. If sugar fueled the economic hegemony of North Europe in the 18th and 19th century, rice fed it. Nowhere has this story been a more integral part of the landscape than Low Country of the coasts of Georgia, South and North Carolina. Rice played a key role in the expansion of slavery in the Carolinas during the 18th century as West African captives were enslaved, in part for their expertise in growing rice. Contributors to this volume explore the varied genealogies of rice cultivation in the Low Country through archaeological, anthropological, and historical research. This multi-sited volume draws on case studies from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and South Carolina, the Caribbean and India to both compare and connect these disparate regions. Through these studies the reader will learn how the rice cultivation knowledge of untold numbers of captive Africans contributed to the development of the Carolinas and by extension, the United States and Europe. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.