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Africana womanism an overview
Africana womanism an overview
Difficulties feminism faces in african cultures
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In this film Daughter of the Dust, at the turn of the century, Sea Island Gullahs decedents of African captive, remained isolated from the mainland of South Carolina and Georgia. As a result of their isolation, the Gullah created and maintained a distinct American Culture. Charleston had a large black population. It’s the place where some enslaved Africans were brought and transported during the Atlantic Slave Trade. The film showcased their location, migration, African spirituality, family and the role of African women.
Diaspora is defined as a group of people who live outside the area in which they had lived for a long time or in which their ancestors lived. As for the film the Peazant family makes the connection by locating their self among the Gullah people of the Atlantic Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. They were brought to the continent as slaves of their Ibo landing. They migrated to the islands which were their first stop to New World. Most left the island of the misery they faced on the plantation, but some remained to grow and work. With the is...
The black women’s interaction with her oppressive environment during Revolutionary period or the antebellum America was the only way of her survival. Playing her role, and being part of her community that is not always pleasant takes a lot of courage, and optimism for better tomorrow. The autonomy of a slave women still existed even if most of her natural rights were taken. As opposed to her counterparts
The award-winning book of poems, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, is an eye-opening story. Told in first person with memories from the author’s own life, it depicts the differences between South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s as understood by a child. The book begins in Ohio, but soon progresses to South Carolina where the author spends a considerable amount of her childhood. She and her older siblings, Hope and Odella (Dell), spend much of their pupilage with their grandparents and absorb the southern way of life before their mother (and new baby brother) whisk them away to New York, where there were more opportunities for people of color in the ‘60s. The conflict here is really more of an internal one, where Jacqueline struggles with the fact that it’s dangerous to be a part of the change, but she can’t subdue the fact that she wants to. She also wrestles with the issue of where she belongs, “The city is settling around me….(but) my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known” (Woodson 184). The conflict is never explicitly resolved, but the author makes it clear towards the end
In contrast to Charity Anderson’s life as a slave, Lucinda Davis describes her days as a farm slave of a Creek Indian master. Although she also describes her story as one of relative safety, she does illustrate the, “drunk d...
Blassingame, John. The Slave Community. United States: Oxford University Press, 1972. Print. October 31st 2013.
Appendix I, Daughters of the Dust, brings reality to the surface. The audience is confronted with an African-American family who live on a Southern offshore island, that ultimately departs and all come together to remember the importance of their ancestors and goes to show the past should not be forgotten. While some of the family departs for the North, others stay behind and live on the soil with their ancestors. -Black filmmakers trying to reflect a different reality for blacks than is shown in other (cinema, trying to use a different cinematic grammar)
In the 1983 film, Black Shack Alley (Rue Cases-Negres), themes of gender, colonialism, and class are explored. The film takes place in Martinique in the early 1900s where it was common for African Americans to work in the sugarcane fields. Whites were superior, and treatment of minorities was dehumanizing. José, a main character of the film, was a young boy living on the sugarcane fields. Everyone around him took part in the brutal labor, acquiescing to the orders of the white man. José frequently partook in conversations with a man by the name of Medouze, a father figure, regarding the continent of Africa. José’s grandmother also plays a pivotal role in his life, as both of his parents have passed on. His grandmother sees his potential, she
In “Of Love and Dust”, Gaines presents two interracial relationships. An interracial relationship is when there are two people with different racial or ethnic groups that are intimate. Sidney Bonbon, a Cajun overseer of Hebert Plantation, has a Creole mistress by the name of Pauline. Whereas, Marcus Payne, a Creole young man recently bonded out of jail, has relations with Louise who is a Cajun. “Cajun generally refers to European American residents of French-speaking Louisiana as distinct from their African American Creole.” (Ray)The time era in which the novel takes place does not approve interracial relationships. In Fact, the setting of the novel takes place in 1948 which ties with the “Jim Crow South”. “Relationships were often forced
The Gullah is a community that lives in the coastal parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia where they fish and farm. The ancestors of the Gullah trace back to Charleston, South Carolina, where there was a port for the Atlantic Slave trade, which was the most commonly used port in North America. Gullah is “more than simply the language and name of a people. It encompasses the essence of struggle, spirituality, perseverance and tradition” (South Carolina Business and Industry). Their relatives are West Africans who suffered many hardships and are honored and remembered by a rare preservation of African culture that the Gullah keeps alive. The Gullah truly live by the meaningful words that “If you don’t know where you’re going, you should know where you came from” (U.S. Department of State). They use African names, carry on African folktales, and create African craftwork. The Gullah have been able to maintain their African heritage because they are secluded from other influences because of the isolation of the Sea Islands.
In the book Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog writes of the many struggles that she faced in everyday life as an American Indian woman. The Lack of running water or electricity, the poverty and oppression found on and around the Indian reservation, are just a few examples of the problems that she had to deal with on a continuing basis. She describes in detail the violence and hopelessness that her people encountered at the hands of the white man as well as the “hang around the fort Indians”. Mary Crow Dog tells of horrors she had to endure while attending the missionary school and of facing the discrimination found outside the reservation. Growing up, one of the hardest trials faced by Mary Crow Dog was not only that of being a Native American but of being a female in a world predominately dominated by Caucasian men.
African literature is rich with examples of the plight that African women suffered during the political and social changes the continent experienced after colonialism. In Ama Aito Aidoo’s short story “Two Sisters”, and “Wedding at the Cross”, the lives of three different women are explored as they navigate a world dominated by not only the men in their lives, but by the omnipresent feeling of colonialism. The women in Aidoo’s “Two Sisters” Mercy and Connie, represent some of the difficulties perpetrated by the rigid societal structure they exist under, and the oppressing force of the men in their lives. Similarly, in “Wedding at the Cross”, the main female protagonist, Miriamu, is bound by societal pressures to assume the role of obedient housewife, and undergoes a loss of self after her husband is consumed with gaining success in post-colonial Africa. Through these stories Aiddo and Thiongo’o represent African women and their struggles as well as their journey to assert themselves independently from the men in their life and their society during a time where the continent itself was struggling with its own identity in the aftermath of Western colonization.
The escaped slaves who lived in this swamp, and those like it, are more well known as “maroons”. The 20-acre island that these maroons inhabited followed traditional rules of an African Village. This meant that the community had prominent chiefs and followed africanized religious practices (Grant, 2016). Much, if not all, of the labor was communal. Charlie, a previous inhabitant
When considering what the African diaspora is, there is one period of time that people commonly refer to. This period of time is the Atlantic Slave Trade. While not the only diaspora of the African people in history, the Atlantic Slave Trade is most commonly thought of due to the scale at which Africans were being emigrated, with around 10-15 million Africans being brought over to the Americas, as well as the effect it has on us today. When looking at the experiences of Africans, they greatly differed dependent on where they landed. These experiences affected later generations of Africans, forcing them to adopt their own culture based on their surroundings and what they were accustomed to from Africa.
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
The land of Ebony is a portrayed such that black is white, male is female, up is down, in this twilight-zone style country. The story plays out as a peek through a small window of time and space into the Ebonite society, centered around the doctoress Zama and her family as Zama tries to convince people that Europe did exist while her husband M’Zama, tries to fix up his brother with an eligible young women named Scruta. All the while the reader is given a tour of Ebony, exploring the major sites of the religious hive, ...
12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright is a photo and text book which poetically tells the tale of African Americans from the time they were taken from Africa to the time things started to improve for them in a 149 page reflection. Using interchanging series of texts and photographs, Richard Wright encompasses the voices of 12 Million African-Americans, and tells of their sufferings, their fears, the phases through which they have gone and their hopes. In this book, most of the photos used were from the FSA: Farm Security Administration and a few others not from them. They were selected to complement and show the points of the text. The African-Americans in the photos were depicted with dignity. In their eyes, even though clearly victims, exists strengths and hopes for the future. The photos indicated that they could and did create their own culture both in the past and present. From the same photos plus the texts, it could be gathered that they have done things to improve their lives of their own despite the many odds against them. The photographs showed their lives, their suffering, and their journey for better lives, their happy moments, and the places that were of importance to them. Despite the importance of the photographs they were not as effective as the text in showing the African-American lives and how the things happening in them had affected them, more specifically their complex feelings. 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright represents the voice of African-Americans from their point of view of their long journey from Africa to America, and from there through their search for equality, the scars and prints of where they come from, their children born during these struggles, their journeys, their loss, and plight...