African Diaspora Essay

Gomez magnifies the untold history of the African people throughout the book. The initial three chapters of this work are referred to as “Old World Dimensions” bring Africa’s independence, strength, and significance to the forefront. The remaining five chapters examines what he refers to as the “New World Realities”. In the beginning of the book he explains the grounds and power Africans possessed in the early Eastern (Mediterranean) world. Gomez stressed two key matters throughout the book. He makes prominent that the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century and the transatlantic slave trade that followed, unfortunately resulting in African Diaspora, was but the tip of the iceberg of who the people and their story. Africa and its citizens did, in fact, have a strong history prior the European’s arrival. Gomez turns to acknowledge Africa(ns)

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 addition to this, when we look at the African diaspora it fits in many different categories. The African diaspora is one of the most complexes for they have different genealogies and several occurrences in history. Thus, this imposes who are the people that make up this culture. The author Paul Tiyambe Zeleza who is the author of New African Diaspora suggests, “There are at least four main constructions of Africa: Africa as a biology, as a space, as memory, and as representation- that is, African identities and cultures are mapped in racial, geographical, historical, or discursive term”(Zeleza, 34). Furthermore, this idea sheds light on the complexity includes multiple identities and has many pieces to

The Africans captured during the Middle Passage encompassed a variety of ethnic groups that did not identify as a singular unit, but slavery in the Americas forced them to see themselves as such, and further isolated them from their individual identities and brought them closer to the institution of slavery. This is exemplified in the attempt to repatriate African-American slaves in 1787 in the United States. It was unsuccessful because of the fact that these African-Americans no longer belonged to simply one ethnic group/tribe/nation. Rather, they were a multifaceted composition of a wide array of various groups in Africa. The attempt at repatriation was disastrous because of the extensive cultural differences between the ‘returnees’ and the

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.

In 1444 Europeans began to kidnap Africans of all social statuses and began to trade them on the west coast of Africa known at the transatlantic slave trade,which had an impact on the african american community that is still evident today.Colorism has been drilled into the psyche of african americans since

It seems quite safe to assume that all human beings desire peace. What is not always very clear is what each person means by peace and how it can be attained and maintained. Religion and peace in an African culture have been almost natural companions in the minds of humans in different periods of history and in different cultures of the world. This is because, although far too many adherents and leaders of the different religions in the world have disrupted the peace in the society by promoting violence and wars, the vast majority of believers still hold that true religion is a source and guarantor of individual and societal peace. The positive side of holding peace together is the knowledge and values

It is essential to note that the term African Diaspora does not describe any single event, group of people or set of customs. It represents a current state of being for many citizens of the world and provides context for understanding the social structures and intercultural relationships of the world we live in today. Collin Palmer provides great insight into the context of diaspora. He writes that there have been several movements, massive migrations of people, throughout history. There is no single “diasporic movement or monolithic diasporic community” to be studied, but rather a confluence of people, events and ideologies that span thousands of years, across every continent. Each period of movement, each diasporic stream, happened for different reasons. Palmer’s approach to the African Diaspora begins with a look nearly 100,000 years into the past. He identifies five major streams, with the first African diaspora that occurred as a

In The Southern Diaspora, James N. Gregory tells the story of migration between the whites and blacks of the south. He focuses on how the whites and blacks moved from the south to the north. Gregory illustrates how two completely different races come together to uplift the American society. Not only does he illustrate the unity of blacks and whites, he also focuses on how the two races had to adapt to a new way of living. Gregory concentrates on how this particular migration recreated the social and political perspective of America.

African-American culture is unique due to their miserable history of slavery that was generated within United States and is related to the history of this nation. Most historians agree that African people arrived in the colonial area, called New World, which is now the United States in the seventeenth century. They came here with British and Dutch settlers through a system of involuntary servitude (Chandler, 2017, p.160). In the early colonial period, African slaves officially enjoyed equal rights with white indentured servants. However, within two or three generations, the situation drastically changed. The slave trade developed; imported African slaves became popular in several colonies with the principle that slaves were properties. Black people at that time were in a position from which they could not escape and their children were born in slavery.

African Americans were brought to the United States in the 1700s and have adapted tremendously since then. After their emancipation from slavery, African-American traditions continued to flourish, such as linguistic style, radical innovations in music, art, and literature, religion, and cultural cuisine. The greatest influence of African cultural practices on European culture is found below the Mason-Dixon line within the American South.

According to (Harris 2001), "the importance of the historical Diaspora was that Africans like other people have traveled abroad as free people, settled down and made important contributions to many Europeans and Asian countries. " The Historical Diaspora was mainly the dispersion of Africans in the world and their settlements. They maintained a consciousness of Africa and their Identity while adapting and making positive contributions to their adopted homelands. This made them create an identity of who they want to be because in the historical Diaspora there was "free fluidity" and that enabled them to do whatever they wanted for that reason there was no constraints. Prior to when the Europeans conducted slave trade, Arabs conducted a slave trade across the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea taking Africans to Arabia, India and the Far East.

The Pan Africanism movement covers the African diaspora subject across the globe, most recently in the Asian continent. The following communities discussed in this paper are from India and the Persian Gulf area.

Phillips’s travelogue presents a deep scepticism about the terms like ‘home’, ‘family’, ‘identity’ etc. According to Wendy W. Walters, “for Phillips the concept of Diaspora refuses to rest on a false binary between home and exile, and his work repeatedly mines the complicated archives of both black and white histories of slavery, exposing their endlessly interrelated natures” (112). Caryl Phillips as a black Briton traces many complex meanings of the terms Diaspora. The term African Diaspora is applied to dislocation of African people to other parts of the world. It is also applied for the descendants of enslaved people during Atlantic slave trade, as Erica Still describes:

This paper explores and analyses the ways in which African writers portray the African diaspora living outside of Africa in the colonial nations; of which England and France would be primary examples. The primary sources for the analyses focus on the text Our Sister Killjoy by Aidoo. House of Hunger by Marechera has been used as a secondary reference. The paper presents the various reactions highlighted in the works, and then seeks to analyse and argue for possible reasons for the presented reactions, touches upon the theme of African nativism, and most importantly analyses colonial power structures that still dominate the discourse in and about Africa.