Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-vsgnj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T08:18:44.744Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SLAVERY AND THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2007

F. Abiola Irele
Affiliation:
Department of African and African American Studies and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Extract

One of the most interesting developments in recent years in the field of African American studies has been the expansion of its horizons beyond the North American theater of Black life and expression that has for so long been featured as its principal focus, and often, in many academic departments, as the only one. Yet, as the early scholarship which serves as the foundation for the field demonstrated, the Black experience in the New World has always presented a continental dimension that provides the concrete grounding for the historical perspective from which that experience must be viewed and understood. This was the methodological premise underlying the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits (1941) and Roger Bastide (1967), who ranged throughout the Black world in quest of the lived connections that gave an original African imprint to the Black experience, while providing theoretical validity to the very concept of a Black world. In the works of such scholars, the consciousness of a continuum that connects Africa to the Black experience in the New World underlies the effort to comprehend the Black diaspora itself in its manifold wholeness.

Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE REVIEW ESSAYS
Copyright
© 2006 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adeeko, Adeleke (2001). Oral Poetry and Hegemony: Yorùbá Oríkì. Dialectical Anthropology, 26(3/4): 181192.Google Scholar
Adeeko, Adeleke (2003). 'Bí Okò Bá Re Òkun Tó Re òsà …': Négritude, Afrocentrism, and the Black Atlantic. In Niyi Afolabi (Ed.), Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections, and Identities, pp. 3761. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Bailyn, Bernard (2005). Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bastide, Roger (1967). Les Amériques noires: les civilisations africaines dans le nouveau monde. Paris, France: Payot.
Carr, Robert (2002). Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African American and West Indian Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Conrad, Robert Edgar (1986). World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
Curtin, Philip (1967). Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Delaney, Martin R. (1970). Blake, or The Huts of America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Douglass, Frederick (1852 [1999]). The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro. In Philp S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Eds.), Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, pp. 188206. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1995). Dark Princess: A Romance. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1910 [1967]). The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Herskovits, Melville (1941). The Myth of the Negro Past. New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
Inikori, Joseph E. (2002). Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Klein, Herbert Klein (1986). The African Slave Trade in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press.
Larson, Pier M. (2006). African Diasporas and the Atlantic. In Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman (Eds.), The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, pp. 129148. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006.
Levine, Robert S. (1997). Martin Delaney, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Matory, James Lorand (2005). Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morss, Susan Buck (2000). Hegel and Haiti. Critical Inquiry, 26(4): 821865.Google Scholar
Sundquist, Eric J. (2006). Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820–1865. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Todorov, Tzevan (1996). Living Alone Together. New Literary History, 27(1): 114.Google Scholar