-African History
Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1800/2E
This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors.
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Africa Since 1940
Frederick Cooper's latest book on the history of decolonization and independence in Africa helps students understand the historical process from which Africa's current position in the world has emerged. Bridging the divide between colonial and post-colonial history, it shows what political independence did and did not signify and how men and women, peasants and workers, religious leaders and local leaders sought to refashion the way they lived, worked, and interacted with each other.
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African Stars
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Another Black Like Me: the Construction of Identities and Solidarity in the African Diaspora
This book brings together authors from different institutions and perspectives and from researchers specialising in different aspects of the experiences of the African Diaspora from Latin America. It creates an overview of the complexities of the lives of Black people over various periods of history, as they struggled to build lives away from Africa in societies that, in general, denied them the basic right of fully belonging, such as the right of fully belonging in the countries where, by choice or force of circumstance, they lived. Another Black Like Me thus presents a few notable scenes from the long history of Blacks in Latin America: as runaway slaves seen through the official documentation denouncing as illegal those who resisted captivity; through the memoirs of a slave who still dreamt of his homeland; reflections on the status of Black women; demands for citizenship and kinship by Black immigrants; the fantasies of Blacks in the United States about the lives of Blacks in Brazil; a case study of some of those who returned to Africa and had to build a new identity based on their experiences as slaves; and the abstract representations of race and color in the Caribbean. All of these provide the reader with a glimpse of complex phenomena that, though they cannot be generalized in a single definition of blackness in Latin America, share the common element of living in societies where the definition of blackness was flexible, there were no laws of racial segregation, and where the culture on one hand tolerates miscegenation, and on the other denies full recognition of rights to Blacks.
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In Township Tonight!: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre 2ed.
In vivid detail, Coplan comprehensively explores more than three centuries of the diverse history of South Africa’s black popular culture, taking readers from indigenous musical traditions into the world of slave orchestras, pennywhistlers, clergyman-composers, the gumboot dances of mineworkers, and touring minstrelsy and vaudeville acts. This up-to-date edition of a landmark work will be welcomed by scholars of ethnomusicology and African studies, world music fans, and anyone concerned with South Africa and its development.
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People Of African Ancestry In Panama 1501-2012
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Reclaiming Zimbabwe
What really went wrong in Zimbabwe? The promise of liberation, human rights, democracy, development and prosperity have been shattered by greed, state sponsored violence and tyranny. Yet the discourse on Zimbabwe has been polarized along racial and political lines.
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The Cambridge Guide to African & Caribbean Theatre
The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre is an exploration of the rich diversity of theatrical traditions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the book traces the ancient and complex roots of African theatre - still evident in community festivals and religious rituals - through the centuries of colonial domination, to the African diaspora and its manifestation in Caribbean theatre. Drawing upon the parent Cambridge Guide to Theatre, material is updated and refocused to offer a specific view of traditional and contemporary theatre activity in over 40 countries. National essays are followed by alphabetically arranged entries on the major figures in the theatrical arts of that country, whilst additional entries concentrate on specific aspects of theatre, from rituals and festivals to theatre companies and language.
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The Children of Africa in the Colonies
How emancipation transformed social and political relations in Barbados
When a small group of free men of color gathered in 1838 to celebrate the end of apprenticeship in Barbados, they spoke of emancipation as the moment of freedom for all colored people, not just the former slaves. The fact that many of these men had owned slaves themselves gives a hollow ring to their lofty pronouncements. Yet in The Children of Africa in the Colonies, Melanie J. Newton demonstrates that simply dismissing these men as hypocrites ignores the complexity of their relationship to slavery. Exploring the role of free blacks in Barbados from 1790 to 1860, Newton argues that the emancipation process transformed social relations between Afro-Barbadians and slaves and ex-slaves.
Free people of color in Barbados genuinely wanted slavery to end, Newton explains, a desire motivated in part by the realization that emancipation offered them significant political advantages. As a result, free people's goals for the civil rights struggle that began in Barbados in the 1790s often diverged from those of the slaves, and the tensions that formed along class, education, and gender lines severely weakened the movement. While the populist masses viewed emancipation as an opportunity to form a united community among all people of color, wealthy free people viewed it as a chance to better their position relative to white Europeans.
To this end, free people of color refashioned their identities in relationship to Africa. Prior to the 1820s, Newton reveals, they downplayed their African descent, emphasizing instead their legal status as free people and their position as owners of property, including slaves. As the emancipation debate in the Atlantic world reached its zenith in the 1820s and 1830s and whites grew increasingly hostile and inflexible, elite free people allied themselves with the politics of the working class and the slaves, relying for the first time on their African heritage and the association of their skin color with slavery to openly challenge white supremacy.
After emancipation, free people of color again redefined themselves, now as loyal British imperial subjects, casting themselves in the role of political protectors of their ex-slave brethren in an attempt to escape social and political disenfranchisement. While some wealthy men of color gained political influence as a result of emancipation, the absence of fundamental change in the distribution of land and wealth left most men and women of color with little hope of political independence or social mobility.
Mining a rich vein of primary and secondary sources, Newton's study elegantly describes how class divisions and disagreements over labor and social policy among free and slave black Barbadians led to political unrest and devastated the hope for an entirely new social structure and a plebeian majority in the British Caribbean.
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The Making of Modern South Africa 5ed.
The new edition of The Making of Modern South Africa provides a comprehensive, current introduction to the key themes and debates concerning the history of this controversial country. Engagingly written, the author provides a sharp, analytical overview of the new South Africa.
- Examines the major issues in South Africa's history, from pre-colonial to present, including colonial conquest; the establishment of racism, segregation, and apartheid; resistance movements; and the eventual founding of democracy
- Contains an additional final chapter that takes the story to the present and considers the challenges and compromises of the first two decades of democracy
- Updated with material on post-apartheid era and current issues in South Africa
- The only book that gives direct guidance to bibliographical material and readings on key debates
- Provides a sharp, analytical overview of the new South Africa
- Extensive references are given to the key writings on each topic and the debates between scholars
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