Suchergebnisse

With the publication of Black Cultural Mythology (2020), the discipline of Africology and African American Studies has a better resource that answers the call for methodological and theoretical tools to institutionalize Africana cultural memory studies as a robust subfield. This content analysis tests the applicability of the critical framework of Black cultural mythology—which emerges from a study of the African American Diaspora of the United States—with the Afroeuropean Diaspora, namely the Black British experience. A feature of this study's methodology is evaluating the efficacy of the genre of anthology—in this case Kwesi Owusu's Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (2000)—as a comprehensive source suitable for content analysis and from which to infer a sense of the region's approaches to cultural memory and memory-adjacent worldviews.

Sankofa is a small part of the Akan philosophical tradition, yet widespread informal and scholarly interpretation confirms that Sankofa represents a Diasporan phenomenon. This essay is an exploratory, working history of Sankofa practice in the United States that confirms the potential of the Adinkra system as a largely untapped philosophical resource. The widespread practical use of Sankofa among Blacks in the United States substantiates the community's thirst for culturally relevant philosophies that can be used to characterize diverse elements of Black life. This essay encourages the community to understand the depths of Sankofa and to explore the Adinkra system's value beyond Sankofa.

Maulana Karenga ends the "Creative Production" chapter in Introduction to Black Studieswith a justifiable, negative critique of literature's modern lapse into types of detachment and personal gratification that are antithetical to the Black studies enterprise. Scholars have embraced this negative critique of the possibilities of literature to contribute to the problem-solving activities of the discipline. Karenga's critique is required study for the discipline as he issues a call for discourse "to provoke and expand the discussion, not to close or avoid it." This essay is a response, provoked by Karenga, that evaluates axiological and epistemological variables of the academy, the discipline of Black studies, and African culture that support the rescue of the literary in Black studies.

The United States is a prime setting for African cultural renewal because it offers a dynamic set of human and technological variables that can link our present to the foundations of our classical African past. The most recent human variables to include in modern strategies for success are the masses of recent immigrants from Africa. In a historical perspective of renewal, it would seem that because Africans can now voluntarily migrate to the United States, they would consider this a unique opportunity for expanding collaborative African globalism. Unfortunately, there is discord between newly arrived African groups and the traditional African American groups. However, the technological variables of the modern era can help to bridge the cultural gap between African Americans, Africans, and the classical African past. There are also perspectives available in literature that function within a social science context and offer additional strategies for a post-Western renewal.