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This chapter explores some pedagogical challenges, responses to, and strategies for the inclusion of African and African American cultural perspectives into the required core curriculum courses at a graduate theological seminary. This chapter represents the author's longstanding personal interest in African and African American religions and cultures — an interest that was deepened through participation in the workshop “Mining the Motherlode of African American Religious Life”. This personal commitment is used to develop seminary courses that draw on African American religious life. In the teaching context, part of the challenge of rethinking the core curriculum lies in the particular nature of theological education.

This chapter discusses the cultural encounters between Britain and Africa in the nineteenth century. It shows that early nineteenth-century British sojourners in African cultures were supplicants of one kind or another. They asked for audience, consideration, protection, information, trade, diplomatic relations, converts, and the rest. By corollary, African cultures maintained the capacity not only to accede to or deny such requests but also to control or expel British visitors. A vital element in the same configuration was that African cultures had considerable powers of arbitration in rejecting or accepting British ideas and artefacts. The record overall shows African cultures to have been aware of the notion of caveat emptor. These conditions shifted after mid-century, and from the 1870s on African cultures found themselves increasingly unable to resist British penetration.

Encounters between cultures are complex, ambiguous, and unstable transactions, simultaneously events in time and works of the imagination. Irrespective of disparities in power, cultural encounters between Britain and Africa in the nineteenth century conformed to the model just described. It is important to acknowledge this, for it is all too easy — but profoundly misleading — to equate the achieved territorial substance of the British Empire in Africa with a hegemony in areas other than the geographical. The British encounter with African cultures in the nineteenth century was never a direct, one-way road leading from London. At the start of the nineteenth century, Britain's presence in tropical Africa was narrowly confined to the-mainly West African-coast. The sheer number and diversity of African cultures that encountered the British in the course of the nineteenth century is bewildering. British and other European colonialisms incorporated African peoples into the ideological and materialist worlds of Western modernity. All African cultures are still negotiating dialogue with — and within — the implications of that fact.

This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.

The chapter shows the role that African culture played in the development of thought and society in the United States. A number of assumptions were made such as political and economic subordination leads inevitably to cultural emasculation. There were also a number of factors that affected the cultural continuity among Africans and their descendents: economic, environmental, and attitudinal forces, and the perpetuation of oral culture in slavery. If one is to understand the distinctiveness of slave religion, one has to understand the intimate relationship between the world of sound and the world of sacred time and space in which there were no clear lines between the past and the present, between the sacred and the secular. There is still a need for many studies in certain areas such as: language, material culture, and ethical values.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of citizenship. Citizenship, in most contemporary formulations, is a relationship between a state and individuals. Two of its features make it a particularly volatile framework. First, it defines inclusion—in a formal sense of membership in a polity and a more subjective sense of belonging—and therefore it also defines exclusion. Second, citizenship melds a person's rights and his or her obligations to a state, so that a state that wishes to enforce obligations faces the fact that the same set of expectations and rhetorics on which its power is based also underscore the claims of individuals to certain rights. One of the great debates of the postwar years among politicians and intellectuals in European and African France was how to reconcile a universalistic, egalitarian conception of citizenship with the particularity of African culture or cultures.

This essay discusses how ontological commitments within modern Western culture are no less problematic than those within traditional African cultures. Each posits unobservable entities to explain the experiential world, and neither has ready access to those posits held as grounding or as otherwise determining what is experienced. It looks at the conceptions of persons in Western and African traditions and suggests that each tradition can learn from the other.

This chapter introduces the intrinsic purpose and aim of the book: the imagining of Africa through popular culture. The book focuses on three case studies, each of which has repackaged African visual culture for the American consumer. These cases involve Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. The study focuses primarily on the way in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they have been articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. The first task in this study, then, is the analysis of how three companies used African visual culture, and how they have generated ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second task involves the investigation of the way that African visual culture focuses Americans’ understanding of themselves, particularly around black and white racialized identities.

This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the goals of this collection of essays, which include the characterization of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and philosophical thought of sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses Eurocentric characterizations of African cultures, institutionalization of racialism in the West, and the concepts of philosophy and conceptual language. It then presents an overview of the essays included in this volume.

In the decades after the Civil War, African-American evangelicalism grew dramatically in a movement that can be called the African-American Great Awakening. More than just church switching from white to black denominations, this movement also included large numbers of blacks who converted to Christianity for the first time. The overwhelming number of black conversions grew from the efforts of African-American evangelists, not from the hands of white missionaries. This chapter analyzes Henry McNeal Turner's debates with Daniel Alexander Payne in the AME church to show how black evangelicalism used components of American culture, such as democratization and religious freedom, to preserve elements of traditional African culture in their Christian practices. Furthermore, African-American Christianity implicitly challenged white Christianity to consider ways in which it had formed unholy alliances with racist dimensions of Western culture.

This chapter describes the African American History Monument in South Carolina as an epitome of the parameters of what can and cannot be said. It begins with an overview of monuments in the South Carolina State House Grounds, most of which celebrate the period between Secession and World War II that witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy. It then considers the planning stages for the African American History Monument, which was designed by Ed Dwight and the historical narrative of which is overlaid with elements of romantic cultural essentialism expressed as an idealized and unitary conception of Africans and African Americans. It also examines two different strategies used to achieve the monument's purpose: one is a historical narrative rooted in the specifics of the black experience in South Carolina; the other is the romanticized pan-Africanism that creates a type of separation, one that locates all that is fundamental to the African American experience in preslavery Africa and in those aspects of African culture that survived in South Carolina.

This chapter considers the question of what happens to the members of oppressed cultures—or lifeworlds—within capitalism. It focuses on the African American culture, attempting to show how the African Americans in Annapolis made many lives for themselves, and examines the number of excavations that were done in Annapolis in order to literally unearth more information about this culture. The chapter also considers the independence of the blacks and the features of African culture that survive in Annapolis today.

This chapter is all about ‘Theresa; a Haytien Tale’ (1828), a short story that was serialized and published anonymously in the first African American newspaper Freedom’s Journal, and is now considered to be the first African American short story. The author argues that this brief text provides an even more redemptive role for women of color. ‘Theresa’ imagines women as central to the liberation of the colony through their unfailing and unquestioning allegiance to the revolutionary cause. ‘Theresa’ is therefore not buttressed by pseudoscientific claims of the innate savagery or hyper-sexuality of “black” women, but instead unequivocally celebrates their ability to contribute to slave rebellions, imagining a hitherto denied active role for women of color in the events of the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter examines cultural encounters between British naval officers and West African peoples, and the role of racial attitudes and identity therein. It looks at the persistence or mutability of value sets taken out to Africa, and the resulting dialogues on race, ethnicity, identity and benevolence within the naval community. To an extent, naval officers perceived West Africans through the lens of metropolitan attitudes and many observations subscribed to common racial prejudices; yet others were more considered, born of experience, interaction and affiliation. This chapter examines officers’ encounters with the ‘exotic’ African women they met on their travels and their engagement with African cultures. As the century progressed, increasing contact with African peoples contributed to a shift in racial attitudes, fuelled by new scientific theories and the proliferation of printed material about race.