Working the Diaspora

Working the Diaspora
Author: Frederick C. Knight
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2012-08-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0814763693

From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean. Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.

Working the Spirit

Working the Spirit
Author: Joseph M. Murphy
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1995-01-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780807012215

"An appreciative and user-friendly book on religion in the African diaspora. Murphy's skillfully drawn portraits offer an inviting introduction to the religious worlds of Vodou, Candomble, Santeria, Revival Zion, and the Black Church" – David W. Wills, Amherst College

Downwardly Global

Downwardly Global
Author: Lalaie Ameeriar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373408

In Downwardly Global Lalaie Ameeriar examines the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women to Toronto. Despite being trained professionals in fields including engineering, law, medicine, and education, they experience high levels of unemployment and poverty. Rather than addressing this downward mobility as the result of bureaucratic failures, in practice their unemployment is treated as a problem of culture and racialized bodily difference. In Toronto, a city that prides itself on multicultural inclusion, women are subjected to two distinct cultural contexts revealing that integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the celebration of some differences and the eradication of others. Downwardly Global juxtaposes the experiences of these women in state-funded unemployment workshops, where they are instructed not to smell like Indian food or wear ethnic clothing, with their experiences at cultural festivals in which they are encouraged to promote these same differences. This form of multiculturalism, Ameeriar reveals, privileges whiteness while using race, gender, and cultural difference as a scapegoat for the failures of Canadian neoliberal policies.

Undercurrents of Power

Undercurrents of Power
Author: Kevin Dawson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812224930

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Germany and the Black Diaspora

Germany and the Black Diaspora
Author: Mischa Honeck
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857459546

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

The African Diaspora

The African Diaspora
Author: Patrick Manning
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2010-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231144717

Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account.

Reversing Sail

Reversing Sail
Author: Michael A. Gomez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521806626

This book examines the global unfolding of the African Diaspora, the migrations and dispersals of people of African, from antiquity to the modern period. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are discussed over a wide expanse of time in ways that link as well as differentiate past and present circumstances. The experiences of Africans in the Old World, in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, is followed by their movement into the New, where their plight in lands claimed by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English colonial powers is analyzed from enslavement through the Cold War. While appropriate mention is made of persons of renown, particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of working class people and their cultural efflorescence. The book also attempts to explain contemporary plights and struggles through the lens of history.

Belonging in Europe - The African Diaspora and Work

Belonging in Europe - The African Diaspora and Work
Author: Caroline Bressey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317989767

This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

The Work of Mothering

The Work of Mothering
Author: Harrod J Suarez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252050045

Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs--nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse--has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema. Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary.