The Video And The Impact It Has Left On Me

By going back to one’s roots, the future of developing countries resided in the “development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions” (Locke, 6). This direction was a form of modernization that was an improvement of relationships between African Americans and other races.

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

Ohuoba’s “The Perception of Africa” shows how Africa has been stereotyped across America in ways including but not limited to: school textbooks, mass media, and news broadcasts. The essay expresses the continent of Africa as more than just poverty and clay roads seen on news broadcasts. Included in the essay was a short story of African native child that lives in the United States and studies about her continent in class. The child is baffled about all the perceptions of her homeland through her textbook and the children her class. Only the negative is studied and talked about rather than the good aspects of Africa. This demonstrates how one can be influenced to think something is worse than what it is.

African history still matters in today’s society, over the course of the semester we have had many debates on this topic, and the media has a very significant impact on the way we view Africa.

notion, Africans were not only perceived as culturally alien people who inhabited a different geographical space but were also denizens a different time. Africa was the land of childhood removed from the light of self conscious history” This mechanism of thought contributed to the foreclosing of any relationship of kinship between Africans and European natives. This notion even helps bolster the stance of corrupt western governments who don’t fulfill the needs of their people. They use Africa as a scapegoat to cover up their failures and shortcomings and the Victim is the distraught African people.

Over the course of four months, through my African World Survey class, I have seen a glimpse of five thousand years of African history unfold. Before entering the class, my expectations from the course was to learn where did my people come from and how did they live. Within the time I spent in the first class, I soon realized that these two questions did not have simple answers to them. Among this discovery, I learned that people in the African Diaspora makeup every aspect of the human race whether we realize it or not. Through the teachings in class and from the readings from the text, “Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora”, I am now knowledgeable on how race, rebellions, and the resilience of people from the African diaspora has changed the entire course of humanity as we know it and all it would ever be.

The colonization of Africa holds the responsibility for the disregard of Africa’s culture, allowing for the tensions to heighten and for the genocide to arise. Africa’s culture

Davies here highlights the issue of identity which has been central to the colonized who have suffered the effects of colonization. The loss of cultural identity as a result of colonization has made remembering and recovering of lost—sometimes stolen— culture one of the central issues of Africana academia. This issue is brought to light in Kincaid’s

Chimamanda Adichie gave a Ted Talk about the “Dangers of A Single Story” during her talk she talks about her experience of leaving Nigeria and attending University here in the United states. Adichie further explains how her roommate expected her to not be familiar with little things like working the stove and even speaking English. Her roommate pitied her because of her story of an African way of life. She presumed they were poor. Adichie’s main argument is to not live in a single story life and live life with multiple stories because if you live a single story life, then all you see is the single story of what you thought of them. The single story that I chose was “Black Men and Public Place” by Brent Staples. In Staples essay he writes

The United States is a large country. It is a country made, by immigrants and individuals from a multitude of different nations and diverse ethnicities. The issue with the public in the United States is that we can be ignorant of the background of these diverse nations, and only view them by the little we have heard about them. Ignorance is the problem stated by Chimamnda Adichie in her Ted talk presentation on the “single story”. The “single story” is not made out of malice, but unawareness, the fact that individuals only see what is identifiable about a group of individuals and attribute it to the whole group. Chimamanda Adichie is African, and with her being African she received all the baggage that is attributed to Africans, whether it

The foundations of racial capitalism, imperialism and colonialism have significantly shaped the existence of African people, and those of the diaspora. As a result of these institutions, the history and implementation of slavery and colonialism have had lasting effects that are essential to the current position of Black folk in Africa and the diaspora; altering the way we view ourselves, our country and the world. Throughout different moments in history, Black folk have equated freedom and liberation with equality, justice, and the right to live as you wish. By looking at the Reconstruction period, colonialism in the continent of Africa and the Black Internationalist movement, I intend to demonstrate the progression of the ideals that begin as freedom, but evolve into new ideals of liberation. Showing that liberation is both a process and a destination for Black folk of the diaspora.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a known writer from Nigeria. She delivers a TED talk on how one collective view of people can inhibit our conversation and become dangerous. Adichie addresses her concerns with the stereotypes and discrimination as a result of the single story. She emphasizes her main point that the single story must be eliminated as it benefits no one. In her speech she uses logos, pathos and ethos to allow her reader to understand the negative effects of the single story due to the dominance of Western influences in literature.

Question 1: The vastness of the field of Africana Studies encompasses multiple disciplines ranging from the individual native African to their descendants spread around the world. It delves into the culture diffusion upon contact with the external forces such as the Europeans and the egregious act of slave trade that followed suit. The effect of which yielded the ever festering wound that is racism. This subject juxtaposes the life and experiences of the continental African and their cousins in the diaspora. In the very first chapter of our Africana Studies book, Maria Azevedo noted how African was originally thought of as a continent without history or contribution to the advancement of the world (Azevedo 7). Imbecilic stereotypes, including the aforementioned one, and numerous others are debunked and corrected for the layman and interested parties alike. People that subscribe to this prehistoric train of thought contributed to the perpetual existence of racism, prominently in America and the rest of the world. Most learned individuals have a general idea of racism, but few could reiterate its origins and why it became so pronounced today. According to Azevedo, the Europeans that settled in Africa fervently believed that “Africans should be enslaved and colonized in order to be saved from extinction and rescued from their own barbaric ways of life” (Azevedo 8). These early supposed

African diaspora signifies to the societies throughout the world that have resulted by lineage from the movement of individuals from Africa primarily to the Americans and among other regions across the world. The phrase has been historically pertained in general to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas through the Atlantic slave trade. The term of diaspora originates from the Latin word “diaspeirein” meaning “disperse”. Therefore, the term African Diaspora refers to the “dispersal” of Africans beyond mainland Africa. The concluding usage of the term is therefore a support term to define a variation of personalities and groups, who can be labeled as members of the African Diaspora. We acknowledge the depth of the diverse assemblies under the term “African Diaspora”, who may have come from conflicting ends of the continent, have left under different circumstances, and may be integrated into their communities to different extents.In the beginning fifteenth century, Europeans seized or acquired African slaves from west Africa and transported them to the Americas and Europe. The Atlantic Slave Trade terminated in the nineteenth century, while the Arab Slave Trade concluded in the middle of the twentieth century. The dispersal concluded slave trading signifies the prevalent involuntary migrations in human history. The commercial effect on the African continent was devastating, as originations were taken from their

Within Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart, Paul Theroux’s The Lower River, and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Africa appears as a recurring setting, and as such, it acts as the agent of change. Within each of these stories, the main characters are not African-born, yet they all find a form of fulfillment in a place considered so remote to many. The role of Africa within Migrations of the Heart, The Lower River, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is pivotal in the role of realizing one’s self.