Holding on to Our Heirtage in a Unique Exhibit by Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman

The author, Curtis J. Evans, argues that African Americans and images of black religion in American culture have been key to the development of American ideals and culture, as well as a reflection of the nation’s failures as a country. Throughout the text, Evans never truly offers any added narrative to the events in history he speaks on, but simply historicizes the burden that has been placed on black religion, and by natural extension, black people. He documents the changes in how black religion was viewed in America and how black America responded to these views.

Exploring Chapter 1, allowed me to view the way different cultures took advantage of not only African Americans, but Native Americans as well. Native Americans were invaded by Spanish settlers, taken into slavery and forced to live with harsh living conditions. Settlers exposed them to a vast number of diseases, and tricked other Native Americans into agreements, in which they were starved, made to live in the cold, and which ultimately led to the death of many of them. Native Americans were resistant to being

Culture is such a broad and complex term that can be defined in numerous ways. It is said that in part is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, communication, belief, art, literature, and music one acquires upon learning and transmitting characteristics from previous generations. Culture is symbolic communication, and its symbols are learned and carefully perpetuated in a society through its institutions. In Black Culture and Black Consciousness by Lawrence W. Levine, he carefully attempts to uncover Afro-American culture during the antebellum and postbellum periods. More often than none, historians like to emphasize the things that get lost in the culture of Afro-Americans when they are taken from Africa and forced to live as enslaved people in North America. However, in Levine’s book, we discover that he carefully

Africans have, since the early settlement of America, has had a great influence in the nation’s growth. These contributions to the United States from enslaved Africans have been greatly portrayed in American culture. Varying from cuisine, to song and dance are not only portrayed today but it has a deep-rooted impact throughout the United States. During the middle passage, enslaved Africans were forced to abandon their everyday lives, their families and their homes and forced to adapt to a new lifestyle they knew nothing of. However, upon arrival into the New World, due to their prior knowledge and wisdom from back home, they were able to quickly adapt and custom themselves to this new lifestyle in order to survive with the hope of potentially one day returning back to Africa. Unfortunately, African contributions to the culture of the United States has received little to no recognition and it has been taken credit for by Europeans and Whites since the early establishment of the United States.

In this first-hand account, Blyden speaks directly to African American people encouraging them to embrace their Africa roots. He wants African Americans to feel a connection to Africa, as well as understand important information about Africa. In several places in this text he tries to dispel some myths that were commonly held in the 19th century, and even today. Myths like there was never any great society that existed in Africa, and Africa was completely uncivilized. However, even though Blyden dispelled many of these myths, he also played into them. He did this by stating that African Americans could go to Africa and help “furnish a development of civilization which this world has never seen” (201). He makes an argument that Africa is civilized, and

African-Americans were carried in chains to America, it was survival to the fittest on their way here, and was known as “chattel,” meaning that blacks and their children were their property. Culturally African-Americans contributed to bringing new words, such as “peanut,” “gumbo,” and “voodoo.” They also brought different views of religions and folkways. 6.) The Salem witch trials reflected the new social stratification in New England, including that many traditional religions were being eclipsed by Yankee commercialism, for example; the Puritans.

Martin states that Eric Sundquist posits, “Chesnutt placed himself closer to those originating beliefs that had become a pale reflection of their former African selves, and he made the remembrance of slave culture a foundation for modern African American culture" (QTD, Martin,17). The conjure tale represents the African spirituality that Charles Chesnutt represents it as a cultural icon of the African culture. Martin illustrates that Chesnutt’s first publication of The Conjure Women is collected seven conjure stories that talk about magic works and superstitions. According to Fett, there are four movements in the traditional conjure

“Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.” In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs provides a portrayal of her life as a black slave girl in the 1800s. Though Harriet described herself as having yellowish brown skin; she was the child of a black mother and a white father. “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.” Born with one drop of black blood, regardless of the status of her white father, she inherited the classification of black and was inevitably a slave. Harriet endured years of physical and mental abuse from her master and witnessed firsthand how slaves were treated based on the color of their skin. Years of abuse can only be taken for so long, like many

In the book Miseducation of The Negro, Carter G. Woodson argues the concept of the systemic education and church organization that have been embedded in us throughout history, which affects African Americans’ in today’s society. Woodson examined the orchestrated events that were created to make Africans’ inferior with people who have no background, and no foundation. The misrepresentation of history in schools has demeaned what Africans have accomplished. In chapter seven through fourteen, Woodson goes in depth of the value of African Americans’ learning their history.

In the African heritage they see the whole universe as scared, they also had many gods and different cults. Upon their arrival in to America in the early day’s ‘negroes’ were immediately stripped form their social heritage (Frazier,1964). They were now considered property of the whites and forced to be baptized in to Christianity, the white’s

In his book “Code of the Street”, Elijah Anderson presents the term “oppositional culture”. In his final chapter and conclusion, Anderson shares the story of two men, John Turner and Robert, both raised and affected by the alienation that led to oppositional culture. In this essay I will compare and contrast the ways in which Anderson uses the men to illustrate oppositional culture, and explain their life trajectories. I will prove that while John Turner and Robert show examples of oppositional culture in the trajectory of their lives, the two eventually differ at the conclusion of their encounters with Anderson. To prove this, I will begin by defining oppositional culture and its relation to African American culture.

Before Africans were brought to America during the slave trade, they had their own culture and society. They had their own language and dance.  They also had their own religion.  History tells us that the Europeans justified their abuse toward the Africans as helping them become more civilized because the Africans lifestyle appeared primal to them and not as developed and industrialized as theirs. What is often overlooked is that even though Africans were taken from Africa and Americanized and have been stripped of their religion, culture, language and even their name, the very essence of the African as a people did not go away.

Europeans feared and discriminate Africans but that didn’t stop them from selling them and making them work in plantation for a certain period of time. In addition, white blames the African for things they did not do – ““the living image of primitive aggressions which they said was the Negro but was really their own” (50). This statement proved that white colonizers get away with things by blaming the blacks, insisting that blacks are going to gore the life of them and denying the fact, blacks to be their own.

The issue of slavery in the United States has been hotly debated for centuries. Historians continuously squabble over the causes and effects of America’s capitalistic, industrial form of slavery. But two of the most heavily discussed questions are whether the institution of slavery destroyed African culture in America, and whether it reduced slaves to a child-like state of dependency and incompetence. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, and historian Stanley Elkins both weigh in on this debate: Herskovits with, The Myth of the Negro Past, and Elkins with, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. In, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Elkins asserts that African culture was all but destroyed by a repression of the slaves’ rights, at the hands of their masters. He claims that complete dependence on their masters and a lack of collective cultural identity and family bonds, reduced slaves to a child-like state of helplessness and ignorance, and childish behavior called the ‘Sambo’. Herskovits takes a different stance in this debate. In, The Myth of the Negro Past, he claims that African culture was not completely destroyed by slavery, and that the ‘Sambo’ stereotype was no more than a myth or at least a gross generalization. He uses slave revolts and the persistence of African culture in American in music, dance, and language as evidence to prove this.

The prioritization of the three Cs (Christianity, Commerce and Civilization) reveal about the people who engaged in the early repatriation movement of African descendants from the Americas that they were looking for the “Black Nationality” by establishing an American colony in Africa. DuBois’ notion of double consciousness shed light on their dilemma in relation to Africa and Africans. The notion presents how the African Americans are perceived by the white Americans in the American society where the majority are whites. The difficulties experienced by returnees from the West regarding reintegration into African societies were the different culture between America and Africa. The different culture caused a clash of civilizations that made