African Diaspora

Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora collects selected essays from the First and Second African Diaspora Institutes and other essays. This revised second edition, with broader geographical scope than the first edition, places greater emphasis on historical and sociopolitical analysis. New essays that examine the African experience and slavery in the Mediterranean, the black experience in Brazil, African religious retentions in Latin American countries, and essays by women that focus on the experience and contributions of African women of the diaspora address significant areas omitted in the first volume.

Arthur examines the forces that have shaped recent African migration to the United States, looking at the characteristics of the African immigrant population, residential and settlement patterns, family and household structure, labor force participation, and pathways to American citizenship. The meanings of the migratory process as well as relationships with the dominant society, and intra immigrant associative networks also are analyzed.

As the millennium approaches, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters are increasing the world's millions of forced immigrants. This text provides gendered case studies from around the world.

This book retraces the African origins of African-American forms of worship. During a five-year period in the field, Pitts played the piano at and recorded numerous worship services in black Baptist churches throughout rural Texas. His historical comparisons and linguistic analyses of this material uncover striking parallels between "Afro-Baptist" services and the religious rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as other African-derived rituals in the United States Sea Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Pitts demonstrates that African and African-American worship share an underlying binary ritual frame: the somber melancholy of the first frame and the high emotion of the second frame. Pitts's revealing perspective on this often misunderstood aspect of African-American religion provides an investigative model for the study of diaspora cultural practices and the residual influence of their African sources.

Dr. Alexis Brooks De Vita analyzes African/Diaspora women's literary voices and images in ways which enhance and expand upon their unique--and uniquely inherited--symbols of female power. She identifies goddesses and ancestresses interacting in tales of literary heroines, reading individual stories against and within their timeless and dynamic historico-spiritual communities.

At the heart of this major statement on black political, intellectual, and religious leaders of 20th-century America are critical portraits of four leaders whose legacies speak to the challenges of race, class, and power: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Harold Washington, and Louis Farrakhan.

In the first book which deals entirely with the subject of time in Africa and the Black Diaspora, Adjaye presents ten critical case studies of selected communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. The essays cover a wide spectrum of manifestations of temporal experience, including cosmological and genealogical time, physical and ecological cycles, time and worldview, social rhythm, agricultural and industrial time, and historical processes and consciousness. The studies confirm the continuity of temporal experience among Africans from pre-colonial times, through the colonial period in Africa, across continents through slavery and Maroon societies, to present-day communities like the Gullah of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The subject of time, now recognized to be relative rather than uniform, draws together evidence from a variety of disciplines, specifically history, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and philosophy.