Middle passage and Black Atlantic Studies

The Atlantic slave trade imprisoned the development of the African countries on the basis of supporting the West. I argue that the Atlantic slave trade, enforced by European traders, was responsible for the exploitation of African countries by means of causing social cataclysms, political illegitimacies and instabilities and economic despair. In the following reading, I will demonstrate how the Atlantic slave trade has caused the Africans social and economic despair by means of looking at demographic figures, gendered relations and other political and economic factors.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university.  The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers—Fred D’Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers’ engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.

This dissertation analyzes the wills left behind by African-born ex-slaves in nineteenth-century Salvador in order to shed light on the lives that they led in the Bahian capital upon their arrival as slaves from Africa, and upon the re-acquisition of their freedom through the alforria system. The material assets and the slave ownership of libertos are studied in depth, as well as their religiosity, and the larger world and networks within which they operated in their Brazilian lives, with a specific eye towards African agency and processes of community formation. The qualitative and in-depth study of post-mortem testaments and inventories as meaningful texts in their own right provides the opportunity to decipher the individual voices of freed Africans, as well as to acquire insight into their Bahian worlds. The relationships, affective ties, and kinship networks of libertos, as well as their efforts to exercise agency and deliberation over their own lives, and the lives of others to whom they were connected, also become evident in the process. The testaments also make it possible to acquire a deeper understanding of African cosmologies in Brazil, through the ways in which libertos understood the passage from the worldly life to the afterlife, the meanings they gave to death, to funerals and other last rites. Understandings of justice, legality, and honor also come to the forefront, while the complex context of nineteenth century Bahia (and Brazil in general) constitutes the constant backdrop against which all these discussions acquire meaning. Understanding the lives, belief systems, and connections of African libertos also has important repercussions for understanding the experiences of Africans and their descendants in slave societies all over the Atlantic World. Insights deriving from the in-depth analysis of libertos’ wills have important implications for furthering our knowledge with regards to the Atlantic slave trade, slave ownership, and enslavement, as well as processes of identity and community formation, retention, adaptation, and resistance in the African Diaspora as a whole.

Jungle/Drum & Bass is often identified as Britain’s answer to U.S breakbeat culture. Rooted in the Black diasporic experience, specific social, cultural and economic components have forged this unique British urban expression, which encompasses race and working class identity, into an alternative sense of national identity, shaped by a common experience of exclusion from recognition within the dominant hegemonic culture.  The genealogy of this movement covers the transculturation between Colonial and Postcolonial Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and America, developing into complex syncretic narratives, where ethnic divisions are unified through music. 
Although the genres and sub-genres within this category seem to conform to a postmodern pattern of continuous fragmentation, reinvention, and trans-modification, the subculture has utilized this as a means of resistance, refusing those attempts at incorporation which insist on diluting and depoliticizing the histories of the Black diaspora

African Americans and contemporary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “Black community”. Their relations are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion. Based on field evidence, the article discusses the role played in it by the reflection in historic memory and place in mass consciousness of African Americans and African migrants of key events in Black American and African history: transatlantic slave trade, slavery, its abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement in the US, colonialism, anticolonial struggle, and the fall of apartheid regime in South Africa. It is shown that they see the key events of the past differently, and different events are seen as key by each group. Collective historic memory works more in the direction of separating the two groups from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception.

This article aims to analyse how an event like the Zong massacre and its uncomfortable traumatic memories can be used to investigate and unlock the biopolitical nature of the transatlantic slave economy and its literary representations. Given the centrality of the slave trade in the development of modern capitalist societies, the article questions why and how recent theories of biopolitics – which underscore the ambivalent relation between power and life in modern societies – have avoided considering slavery and the plantation system as pivotal aspects in the genealogy of the contemporary forms of sovereignty and governance. Inside this wider framework, the article considers how the specific engagement of several Caribbean writers with the unspeakable core of dehumanisation and silencing produced by slavery is paradoxically capable – through a turbulent and painful confrontation with language, memory, ‘bare life’ and the historical unconscious – of developing effective responses to those overwhelming structures. In particular, the work of NourbeSe Philip in her poem Zong! and Édouard Glissant’s poetic and philosophical confrontation with the abyss of absolute loss, show us how writing can specifically engage with the inherent ambivalence of biopolitics: the language of the Law, with its tremendous power of capturing and sometimes undermining or destroying life, and the creative power of language itself to reshape identities and subjects, both on a personal and on a collective level. Those openings allow us to imagine and perform empowering and creative relations between life and its forms, which can be considered as attempts to inaugurate an affirmative biopolitics in our present.

Résumé

Cet article vise à analyser comment un événement tel que le massacre du Zong, avec ses mémoires pénibles, peut fonctionner de manière paradigmatique pour révéler la nature biopolitique de la traite transatlantique et de ses représentations littéraires. Étant donné le caractère central de l’économie de plantation esclavagiste pour le développement des sociétés capitalistes, l’article se demande pourquoi et comment les théories biopolitiques les plus récentes – lesquelles s’interrogent sur la relation entre le pouvoir et la vie dans les sociétés contemporaines – ont évité de considérer l’esclavage et la plantation comme des aspects centraux dans la généalogie des formes contemporaines de la souveraineté et de la gouvernementalité. Dans ce cadre plus large, l’article examine comment l’engagement spécifique de plusieurs écrivains antillais avec le noyau indicible de déshumanisation et de silence qui est au cœur de l’esclavage est capable – à travers un affrontement douloureux avec le langage, la mémoire, l’inconscient historique et la « vie nue » – de développer des réponses effectives à ces structures accablantes. L’impressionnant travail de NourbeSe Philip sur le langage dans son poème Zong ! et l’affrontement poétique et philosophique de Glissant avec l’abyme de perte absolue du sens, nous montrent comment l’écriture peut faire face à l’ambivalence constitutive de la biopolitique : le langage de la Loi, avec son pouvoir de capture et parfois de destruction de la vie, et la puissance créatrice du langage, capable de refaçonner les identités et les sujets sur un plan individuel et collectif. Ces ouvertures nous autorisent à imaginer et réaliser des dynamiques créatrices entre la vie et ses formes, qu’on peut considérer comme des efforts d’inaugurer une biopolitique affirmative dans notre présent.

During an Anglo-American literature course, we especially focused on the Middle Passage and its authors, which led to this essay were I briefly explore Cugoano's and Equiano's autobiographies, along with Hayden's and Boone's poems. These texts are looked at through the lenses of various studies, above all Gilroy's and Du Bois'.

Island studies is a growing field of research. A relational turn has recently taken place in island studies alongside relational turns in associated fields of research, including oceanic and ship geographies (although not always in conversation with them). While all three now challenge the land-locked nature of geography and related disciplines, this paper suggests that islands, oceans and ships should not always be reductively conceptualised in isolation, because they are often bound together through complex and shifting relations and assemblages. After reviewing debates and conceptual gaps in the critical island, sea and ship literatures, the paper makes this argument by reference to an island dance performance and social institution that is not wholly of the island, the ship or sea, called the Barbados’ Landship.

KEYWORDS:- Island Studies, Islands, Relational Turn, Ships, Ocean, Sea

This article explores the tension between the senses and the immaterial in Barbadian artist’s Joscelyn Gardner’s multimedia installation White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece (2003), and Omi Ebora (2014) and in the poem Zong! by Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip (2014). By the immaterial I refer to the traces in contemporary art of the slavery trade and plantation culture. I analyze three aspects: how sensorial art functions, what is the spectral in sensorial art, and what does the specter (based on Derrida’s hauntology) do for the Caribbean in the present. I suggest that the spectral in Caribbean art functions as an injunction to deal with our inherited identities, which I defined elsewhere as membership beyond consent, in such a way that we can still live with moral freedom, defined perhaps as our right and our obligation to act differently. This is what the ghostly does for both Derrida and Gardner: in the intersection between past and present narratives, there is a responsibility; the ghostly is about the obligation to choose from one's inheritance.

While historical studies of the Atlantic slave trade have amply demonstrated the magnitude of slave mortality during the Middle Passage, only recently have they started to examine how the captives might have endured and coped with this traumatic experience. Although it constitutes a major topos in African diasporic culture, the Middle Passage has only occasionally been represented directly and in details in novels and in films. This article examines three recent narratives of the Middle Passage, Fred D'Aguiar's novel Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Guy Deslauriers's film Passage du milieu (2000), and Stephanie Smallwood’s historical study Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007). Beyond their individual poetic, aesthetic, and scholarly qualities, what is most striking about these three texts is that they all use the figure of the living dead in order to explore the captives’ experience of the transatlantic journey. If the ghastly quality of the living dead powerfully captures the life-threatening material and physical conditions the captives endured on the voyage, its dual, liminal character also allows D'Aguiar, Deslauriers, and Smallwood to represent the metaphysical, psychological, social, and cultural journey they were forced to undertake. Through their use of the trope of the living dead, these three texts show that if death is indeed a central aspect of the experience of the Middle Passage, it impacts the captives in ways that go well beyond the issue of mortality.

n more ways than critics have mentioned, Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Black Panther (2018) holds a vibrant conversation with Wole Soyinka’s mythopoetic orientation. But apart from Ryan Coogler’s ventriloquist reference to “The Fourth Stage,” Black Panther confers with Soyinka in many other interesting ways. In this article, I explore the mythic patterns in the movie by reading it alongside Soyinka’s densely mythic essay, “The Fourth Stage,” in order to pry the movie open for analysis. I posit that reading Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther side-by-side Soyinka’s “The Fourth Stage” amplifies the dialogic tension between violence and justice in both works, on the one hand, and exposes the strategies by which female subjectivity is reimagined in Black Panther’s radical universe, on the other hand. I also note that, in particular, Black Panther emerges from the comparative reading as somewhat inadvertently attempting a redefinition of tragedy.

Centuries ago, Africa witnessed one of the most shocking traffic in human beings ever to happen in the world. The traffic stripped millions of young, brave and strong African people from their land for free labour beyond the horizon. The traffic set commercial opportunities for the perpetrators providing them with wealth and fame. The last decades have seen a rise in literature triggered by the need for a devoir de memoir for future generations. This event has transformed the various literary genres that are conducted by African writers to induce the changing of mind in the descendants-victims and the perpetrators. This is manifested in an approach of revealing the historical event by using contemporary fictional devices. The novel under scrutiny, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995) narrates in a special way the Transatlantic Slave Trade that has been the concern of a whole country in terms of trauma embodied in characters in post-colonial female writing.
The paper seeks to analyse the interest of contemporary African female writers to map in the ghosts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which has provoked the prevailing poverty in Africa for centuries. The focus of this paper is to examine how Amma Darko uses fiction to map that shameful and horrible trade named triangular slave trade or Transatlantic Slave Trade.

In this paper, I discuss the works of two authors: Virginia Woolf and David Dabydeen. After a brief introduction of the authors and their writings, I will then proceed to analysing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Daybideen’s Turner and A Harlot’s Progress. Finally, in the conclusions, I will try to show that, despite some obvious differences, these writers have more in common than it could be thought at a first glance.

Call for Papers
Globalized Peripheries
New Approaches to the Atlantic World 1680–1850
Date: July 5th–7th, 2018
Place: European University Viadrina
(Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany)

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• The exchange and movement of goods and people across
the oceans
• Merchants and merchant networks
• Consumption and material culture
• (Proto-)Industrial production and development
• Theories of political economy
• (Religious) Minorities as agents of trade
• Gender from a global perspective
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to “Atlantic
History” and/or “centers” and “peripheries”
Although the conference has no specific regional focus, we explicitly invite papers focused on the following “peripheries” of the Atlantic World and/or its historiography:
• Central and Eastern Europe
• West and West Central Africa
• South Asia

Proposals of ca. 300 words as well as a short CV (max. 1 page) should be sent to: globalized-peripheries@europa-uni.de
by October 15th, 2017.

We only accept proposals sent electronically to this e-mail address. Feel free to contact us at this address should you have any further questions. Please also indicate if you would like us to consider your proposal for publication.
We look forward to receiving your proposals!
Klaus Weber, Jutta Wimmler, Anka Steffen & Torsten dos Santos Arnold
www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/globalized-peripheries

African Americans, descendants of slaves forcidly brought from Africa to America hundreds years ago, and contemporary voluntary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “Black community.” Remarkably, this fact contradicts the postulates of many breeds of “Black nationalism” from the mid-19th century onward, which argue that all Black people are “brothers and sisters,” because they share a common spirituality and have a common cause that demands their joint action all over the world. Among the reasons for this, differences in the reflection of the past in their historic memory play an important role. Based on evidence collected in six states in 2013 and 2014, this article discusses reflection in historic memory and place in the mass consciousness of African Americans and contemporary African migrants of the key periods and events in Black American and African history: pre-slave trade and pre-colonial time; transatlantic slave trade, slavery and its abolition in the US; colonialism and anticolonial struggle in Africa; civil rights movement in the USA; and the demise of apartheid in South Africa. It is shown that contemporary African migrants and African Americans see the key events of the past differently. Even more so, each group sees different events as key. Many members of both groups do not feel that they share a common “Black history.” To some extent, visions of the past promote Africans and African Americans’ rapprochement as victims of long-lasting White domination. However, in the final analysis, collective historic memory of both groups works more in the direction of separating them from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception. In general, the relations between African Americans and recent African migrants are characterised by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion of two magnets. They understand that among all ethnoracial communities in the country, they (and also African Caribbeans) are the closest to each other, but myriads of differences cause mutual repulsion. The differences in the historic memory of African Americans and recent African migrants in the USA play a significant role in the fact that the “magnetic poles” of the Black communities both attract and repel them.

The debates around cultural memory in general, and the memory of slavery in particular, have generally been based on the common and allegedly self-evident view that remembering and commemorating are the only politically valid and ethically justifiable ways to deal with the past. What constitutes an ethical memorialization of slavery and adequate representation of the enslaved is of course a more difficult and unresolved question. In recent years, several writers and scholars have taken this debate in a new direction by assessing memory and memorialization’s complicity with the very structures of power and violence that underwrite slavery and colonialism. Recognizing that memory is, in Judith Halberstam’s terms, “a disciplinary mechanism” that imposes order and coherence upon stories of ruptures and that entails its own erasures and silences (The Queer Art of Failure), these writers and scholars have explored the potential of a “strategic use of silence” (Saidyia Hartman) and of ways of “not-telling” or “un-telling” (M. NourbeSe Philip). These modes of writing—and, precisely, non-writing—become a way of resisting what Saidiya Hartman describes as the “violence of the archive” of slavery, an archive that contains only the absence of the disappeared bodies of the enslaved. Working with but also against this archive, Hartman thus explores modes of writing about the enslaved that do not replicate the original violence done to them. In Zong!—a volume of poetry about an infamous historical slave ship voyage during which over a hundred African captives were thrown overboard in the name of profit—M. NourbeSe Philip turns the violence of the archive against itself in order to “defend the dead” and capture the victims’ unspeakable experience: using the only historical source about the event, a two-page record of the trial between investors and underwriters that followed the massacre, Philip cuts to pieces and mutilates the legal text in order to break the language that defined the Africans as commodities and create through those fragments and silences a space of “anti-meaning” that allows her to tell a story that cannot be told but by un-telling it.
Following Halberstam’s provocative and counterintuitive proposition that the failure to remember may constitute a form of critique and an alternative mode of knowing, this paper will examine the poetics and politics of silence and untelling explored in such works as Hartman’s and Philip’s. It will analyze how these challenging modes of memory offer epistemological and discursive alternatives to the problematic reliance on positivism of traditional history, which imprisons the enslaved subject in the archive, and to forms of memorialization—notably state-sanctioned ones—that unduly fix the past in static narratives and monuments. But I also wish to probe the limits and problems of such projects: for all its critical potential, what these writers’ profoundly self-reflexive work reveals is also the disappointment, frustration and bereavement that the failure to remember entails. Commenting on their own endeavours, the writers often admit to their failure to fail, as they yield to the desire to find consolation in, or impose meaning on, the stories they tell. Assessing their own place in the (hi)stories they tell, they also acknowledge that these are as much about the past as they are about the present, as much about the enslaved and the disappeared as about themselves.

Glissant and the Middle Passage is a unique book. With the exception of Sam Coombes's recent book Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (2018), which focuses mostly on Glissant's latter philosophical thought, the majority of the monographs in English that have theorized Glissant's politics and aesthetics have focused on his fiction, with only brief mentions of his collections of essays, manifestos, and theoretical works (cf.

"Оттенки черного. Культурно-антропологические аспекты взаимовосприятия и взаимоотношений африкано-американцев и мигрантов из стран субсахарской Африки в США"

The book is based on the field evidence collected in 2013–2015 in more than a dozen cities and towns of seven states.

Монография основана на полевых материалах, собранных в 2013–2015 годах. В центре внимания автора – взаимовосприятие и взаимоотношения представителей двух африканских по происхождению групп населения США: существующего уже несколько столетий сообщества африкано-американцев и сложившихся в наше время диаспор выходцев из различных государств субсахарской Африки. В историко-социологическом контексте рассматриваются такие культурно-антропологические аспекты восприятия друг друга черными американцами и африканскими мигрантами, как историческая память и взаимные образы культур. Показывается влияние того, как взаимовосприятие носителей разных культур сказывается на взаимоотношениях между ними. Монография, с одной стороны, лежит в русле общих тенденций в современных антропологии и африканистике, а с другой, вносит вклад в разработку конкретной слабоизученной темы, актуальной не только для этих научных дисциплин, но и для американистики.

Almost all of the photographs I have ever taken have been of people. But this changed, for a few weeks, in August 2007, when I was in Ghana – around the town of Assin Manso and in the castle at Cape Coast. I found myself photographing water, dungeons and unpaved paths through fields and bush. I want to make sense of this aberration – to myself, to you.

‘Blood River’ is an essay about my encounters – as a Black subject, photographer and student of the transatlantic slave trade – with sites of memory in Ghana. Through photographs and words, the essay reflects on my experience at places where the Middle Passage began and the long dead still trouble the living.

In this paper, I confront Middle Passage memory, discussing how it haunts us in the present moment and to what effect. I understand Middle Passage memory as the social memory of the diasporic African collective experience of  the transatlantic Crossing,  and I propose that we live in the afterlife of slavery,  in that the catastrophe of the Crossing, and the legacies it represents, reverberate into the present moment. I identify these reverberations in the continuities of oppression in the current systems of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and global capitalism, which perpetrate the ongoing social, political, and economic construction of Black and Indigenous bodies as fungible, enslaveable, genocidable, and exiled from the category of human.

Pre-publication text of an essay included in The Locations of George Lamming, ed. Bill Schwarz, Oxford: Macmillan (Warwick University Caribbean Studies), 2007: 132-50. The essay's main contention is that Lamming’s revisionist use of allegory refashions it as a trope which, despite its supposed colonial genealogy, functions as an instrument for transforming power relations, and which, particularly in Natives of My Person, moves to inhabit a space outside the discursive binaries inherent in the older view of the mode as ‘one thing in words and another in sense’.

This essay examines the politics, poetics and physics of technologies of time in Marcia Douglas's novel, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. I trace how the novel's dysfunctional clock tower, an interdimensional portal, marks unstable spacetime and mimics the disorientation ushered in by colonial epistemologies that violently displace the archives of Jamaican memory. To recover Jamaican temporalities, Douglas draws inspiration from the quantum mechanics of dub’s echo effects and crafts a Jamaican version of a theoretical model in physics called ‘string theory.’ In the novel’s version, tree roots, Rastafari locs and guitar strings amplify the subterranean vibrations of black pain on the clock tower site. These infrasonic disturbances destabilize clock time and give rise to alternate forms of memory, narration and motion—including time travel and teleportation. I argue, therefore, that the way that sounds move in the novel gets to the heart of profound questions about the nature of Caribbean space and time.

This dissertation analyzes the wills left behind by African-born ex-slaves in nineteenth-century Salvador in order to shed light on the lives that they led in the Bahian capital upon their arrival as slaves from Africa, and upon the re-acquisition of their freedom through the alforria system. The material assets and the slave ownership of libertos are studied in depth, as well as their religiosity, and the larger world and networks within which they operated in their Brazilian lives, with a specific eye towards African agency and processes of community formation. The qualitative and in-depth study of post-mortem testaments and inventories as meaningful texts in their own right provides the opportunity to decipher the individual voices of freed Africans, as well as to acquire insight into their Bahian worlds. The relationships, affective ties, and kinship networks of libertos, as well as their efforts to exercise agency and deliberation over their own lives, and the lives of others to whom they were connected, also become evident in the process. The testaments also make it possible to acquire a deeper understanding of African cosmologies in Brazil, through the ways in which libertos understood the passage from the worldly life to the afterlife, the meanings they gave to death, to funerals and other last rites. Understandings of justice, legality, and honor also come to the forefront, while the complex context of nineteenth century Bahia (and Brazil in general) constitutes the constant backdrop against which all these discussions acquire meaning. Understanding the lives, belief systems, and connections of African libertos also has important repercussions for understanding the experiences of Africans and their descendants in slave societies all over the Atlantic World. Insights deriving from the in-depth analysis of libertos’ wills have important implications for furthering our knowledge with regards to the Atlantic slave trade, slave ownership, and enslavement, as well as processes of identity and community formation, retention, adaptation, and resistance in the African Diaspora as a whole.

Reale, Virtuale e Immaginario III. Doppio appuntamento all’Ateneo di Bari e alla Libreria Prinz Zaum sull’Afrofuturismo con due ospiti di eccezione: A Qadim Haqq, artista visuale da Detroit e Andrea Benedetti, producer e critico musicale da Roma.
Ritorna Reale Virtuale e Immaginario, un evento straordinario nato dalla collaborazione tra il Centro Studi e Ricerche di Apulia Film Commission e i Corsi di Scienze della Comunicazione – Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, Psicologia, Comunicazione (Uniba), con la partecipazione di MEM – Mediateca Emeroteca Musicale e di S/Murare il Mediterraneo.
La fantascienza black, spesso ispirata alla deportazione nelle navi negriere dei futuri schiavi verso l'America, insieme alle sonorità della techno e dell'electro, sono espressioni di una tragedia umana vecchia di 400 anni e che oggi ritorna quanto mai attuale, a causa delle inarrestabili morti nei mari del Mediterraneo.
Nato nell’alveo della diaspora africano-americana, l’afrofuturismo parte da alcuni assunti fondamentali: l’omologia tra schiavo, alieno e robot derivata dall’esclusione dei neri dall’ordine del discorso sul futuro e sullo sviluppo tecnologico e maturata in seguito alla tragedia della schiavitù e delle morti occorse durante le deportazioni del Middle Passage.

Africans’ struggle for a decent social status in the USA is complicated by their frequent association with African Americans who, as a community, occupy a low social level. In the migrants’ attempts to distinguish themselves from African Americans, an important part is played by emphasizing cultural differences between the two groups. These differences serve Africans as a proof of their belonging to a different community; a positive estimation of their own culture contrary to African American supports their claims for a better social status. The source of their cultural distinction from, and superiority over African Americans, the Africans see in history of black people in and outside Africa. Based on field evidence, this paper discusses how Africans in America capitalize on the history of Africa. Africans stress that, not being descendents of slaves, they do not have inborn “slave mentality”, that they proudly feel natives of independent states while African Americans do not know where they are from. Africans frequently argue that the history of African Americans began only with the slave trade and they do not inherit the greatness of African civilizations. Most Africans believe that if there is any “black history” at all, it is nothing more than history of common sufferings of black people from white all over the world. So, the African migrants employ knowledge of history not only for claiming a decent social status but also for supporting self-identity and sense of dignity.

On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Elizabeth DeLoughrey reflects on the work of Sir Wilson Harris, among others , while exploring Caribbean shipscapes, particularly how the visual and literary arts imagine an "ocean of space."

The 1619 Project, directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, may well be doing more harm than good. By amputating the history of Indigenous Americans, by broadly ignoring the central roles played by Black women and queers in the centuries-long struggle for equality, and by failing to address US Blacks whose ancestries do not come out of the Middle Passage, The 1619 Project is replacing one series of ghastly untruths with new ones.

The article attempts to examine the roots of the myth of Flying Americans and the way it is connected with the shaping of cultural identity of African Americans within the formation of new religious movements in America. The significance of this narrative cannot be separated from the traumatic situation which generated it, hence the importance of its roots. The reference to the ethnohistorical reality and the general outline of the slaves’ beliefs throughout the time, allows one to trace back the original area of its occurrence.