TOWARD A REEXAMINATION OF AFRICAN IDENTITY

Whereas  endemic intra African slavery was among people of similar ethnicity, large ethnic and civilizational differences between African slaves and European slave owners might have created unprecedented gaps between slaves and owners. And adapting to those gaps at such a scale and speed might be seen as a most unusual event in history? Moreover, the indiscriminate (?) mixing of Africans of different cultures and languages together so that THEY had to adapt to each other could be seen as an equally monumental cultural challenge. (It's unclear as to the nature of adaptation by and among slaves as opposed to that by or among slave owners. Scholars should delve into this.)

A takeaway from the issue of adaption by continental African to cultural conditions in the West is the unalterable way in which Africans in the West challenge the issue of African identity. Is the African in the West a harbinger of African unity? And, if so, is European heritage therefore embedded in a provisional African identity? 




Trevor Burrowes "...are you familiar with the writer Albert Murray? This week’s essay is probably the sixth or seventh that has brought his work to mind for me. (Other times when you’ve written about architecture, mythology, the spiritual influence of place, and especially American history, culture, character.) It’s never a specific enough connection to describe in a concise comment, but I suspect you’d find a lot to chew on in his body of work.

He’s difficult to characterize briefly, but there’s a distinct and subtle set of ideas running through all his work. I’m just going to drop in a paragraph that hints at a few of his themes:

'Thus, in the second and third quarters of nineteenth century America, Negroes can find adequate historical as well as mythological documentation for ‘all that really matters’ in the establishment of their national identity. Not that they need to do so to meet any official requirements whatsoever. After all, such is the process by which Americans are made that immigrants, for instance, need trace their roots no further back in either time or space than Ellis Island. By the very act of arrival, they emerge from the bottomless depths and enter the same stream of American tradition as those who landed at Plymouth. In the very act of making their way through customs, they begin the process of becoming, as Constance Rourke would put it, part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian–and part Negro!'

That’s from his essay 'The Omni-Americans,' which is as good a place to start with Murray as any."

Jonathan.

https://www.amazon.com/Omni-Americans-Perspectives-Experience-American-Culture/dp/0876900015