Critical Review Of Something Torn And New: An African Renaissance

Critical Review of Scholarship
First, to help support my point I will read one of our required readings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o by using a passage from Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. This text will help me elaborate more on the question; how we should undertake the study of African experience? After only reading a few chapters I am excited to read more because it is clear that it provides so much information.
Next, another text that will help support my point is “What Black Studies is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work” written by Dr. Greg Carr. To understand how to undertake the study of the African experience, I must take time to look at what does not undertake the study of African experience.

I believe this is important because she was able to incorporate the world of art into our history. When it comes to Black studies art form is something that is very prevalent in our culture. Many of times artist have portrayed our struggle through song, art work, poems etc. Some prime examples would be Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit”, Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise”, Sam’s Cooke song “A Change is Gonna Come”. These songs like many others depict much of the struggles we face as African

But after reading, I realized that people often research our history and alter it. For example, during class we discussed that since the beginning of time “we have been trained to forget”(Carr). Dr.Carr included in his powerpoint a picture that featured how are history has been tarnished or forgotten. Moreover, even worse we tend to leave out very important information. Thus, it is our job to include all information and not leave out facts. Furthermore, we have to be able to take this history that we are taught and research more. For example, in this article Greg Carr mentioned “Scholarship that links the study of African Diaspora subject to long arcs of history extend as far back as classical Africa(Kemet,Kush,Axum,Meroe are summarily dismissed, in spite of the undeniably rigorous scholarship published during the last two generations”. After reading this I began to think about my high school classes rarely did we cover information that did not span from the last two generations. But when studying white history we went back as far four or five generations. When studying this we have to be able to not just get stuck on the recent history but take time to dig