Search Results

In a race sensitive society, how people racially identify and the salience of these identities influence their associations, including the churches they to choose to attend. This chapter explores the racial identities of interracial church attendees, and the role of racial identity for explaining who attends interracial churches.

This chapter traces the black discourse on African identity that Wheatley and Sancho unknowingly initiated into the first generation of slave autobiographers. Most of the men who wrote these narratives had lived in African villages or in slave communities in the plantation regions of America, experiences foreign to both Wheatley and Sancho. Perhaps as a result, when they asserted African identities in their narratives, they confronted ethnic division more directly. The most celebrated among them was Equiano, who used that confrontation to develop a mythic vision of an African unity that predated the ethnic division that haunted Africa in the age of the slave trade. He and Cugoano, his collaborator, sought a way to recreate the unity among sub-Saharan Africans that they perceived to have been broken in postbiblical times.

This introductory chapter opens with the brief story of the origins of Ira Aldridge, the black actor known throughout Europe as the “African Roscius”. This story is then linked to the issue of African identity. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

This chapter shows how Wheatley and Sancho, having been labeled “African” writers, accepted that label and subtly altered what it meant to be “African” by what they wrote. Neither Africa nor African identity plays a central role in their texts, but the identity is present and acknowledged. Both were aware of ethnic diversity on the continent and understood that it undercut any notion of an indigenous “African” identity. Both responded by creating a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora rather than from conditions on the continent, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage.

Bringing together psychological research on life stories and generativity in African-American men and women with a reading of African-American autobiographies, folk tales, and 19th century slave narratives, this chapter examines the relationships between race, generativity, and narrative identity in American life. Like their Euro-American counterparts, highly generative African-American adults, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, tend to construct highly redemptive life narratives. Their life stories, however, tend to draw from a rich storehouse of images and tropes favored in African-American psycho-literary traditions, stories about life that privilege the discourse of personal (and societal) liberation and underscore such themes as “early danger” and the role of a moral “opponent”.

This chapter traces the rise of the African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia, one of the early churches to describe itself as “African”, and the progenitor of black Baptist churches in Canada, Sierra Leone, and much of the British Caribbean. The chapter then considers two institutions founded by black New Englanders at roughly the same time — African Freemasonry and the African Union Societies of Newport and Providence, Rhode Island — and traces their distinct but parallel efforts to build “African” institutions and identities. Leaders of these institutions sought to reconcile their deep faith in a Christian God with the prevalence of “paganism” in Africa, reaching toward a belief that American slavery represented God's plan for bringing the light of true religion to the Dark Continent. This conviction gave all three groups a shared stake in the efforts of those Black Loyalists who would move to Sierra Leone in 1792.

This chapter traces the demise in black discourse on African identity through the 1820s. As black American antislavery activists became increasingly convinced that the ACS served slaveholders' interests and that asserting an “African” identity played into the Society's efforts to portray Africa as the natural home for black Americans, fewer and fewer blacks referred to themselves as Africans. “Colored” institutions began to supplant “African” ones. Orators insisted that free blacks living in the United States were “Americans” rather than “African”, and that their futures lay in the New World rather than the Old.

This chapter outlines five themes. First, it sketches some of the salient spatial and temporal dimensions of the black experience to give a sense of geography and chronology. Next, it probes the nature of this empire, particularly the relation between imperial centre and colony, and the opportunities it provided for blacks to turn the idea and rhetoric of the British empire against the British even as those ideas ensnared them. Third, it examines the contradictions between the inclusionary and exclusionary aspects of the British empire, between the idea of empire as a community of loyal British subjects, and the idea of empire as an arena for the oppression and suppression of blacks. The fourth theme is how subjecthood changed for all blacks, looking specifically at the effects of emancipation in the Caribbean and Indirect Rule in Africa. It highlights the centrality of labour to the black experience and the importance of labour struggles to black negotiations within the empire. Finally, the British empire was an important crucible in which blacks created dynamic and syncretic cultures, distinct for their high degree of hybridity and invention, fusing many different elements together, yet using common forms, such as the English language. The shared forms ultimately provided the basis for a Pan-African identity that challenged the idea of black loyalty to the British empire. Across the linked territories, blacks produced modes of expression that resonated throughout the empire.

This chapter follows the story of the Loyalists — who came to call themselves “Nova Scotians” — in their exodus to an African promised land. It traces their efforts to put into practice the transformative project that Gustavus Vassa had outlined at the conclusion of his Interesting Narrative. In these settlers' struggles with the Sierra Leone Company, which governed the colony, and their efforts to forge relationships with the Koya Temne people who surrounded the colony, the Nova Scotians confronted some of the inherent complexities in the emerging diasporic vision of African identity. In the process they, and some black New Englanders who hoped to follow them, began to forge an alternate way to think about the links connecting “Africans” to one another.

The epilogue looks ahead to the reemergence of black discussions of African identity and black emigrationism during the 1850s. It examines the efforts of Martin R. Delany, sometimes called the “father of African nationalism”, to encourage black emigration from the United States during the 1850s, and to the sense of African identity that he articulated while advocating emigration. The epilogue suggests the persistence of many ideas initially offered by the first generations of self-styled “Africans”, and some of the costs of the demise of the remarkable vision that activists like Equiano, Allen, Coker, and Cuffe had developed.

This chapter looks at George Eliot's usage of the “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation” scenario in her works and what it means for African American writers. Virtually no other major British writer ever told it at all. By contrast, a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers—most of them African American—constructed this same scenario, almost invariably in stories about African American identity. Within American literary history, such stories are legible as refutations of what has come to be known as the tragic mulatto/a plot. In stories with this plot, the discovery that a character who has believed himself or herself to be white has some African ancestry is cataclysmic, leading directly to enslavement, sexual violation, madness, and/or death.

This chapter examines readings of Chinua Achebe with Conrad, Cary, and Emecheta, showing the complexity of Achebe's own historical, cultural, political, and literary interventions, and indicating the continuity of West African-British writing from the abolitionist generation of Equiano and Gronniosaw to the postindependence generation of Achebe and Emecheta. This chapter is an attempt that opens Achebe himself to ideological critiques that examine the overt anticolonialism and nationalism of his work from perspectives of which he himself may not have been conscious.

This chapter offers a reading of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, arguing that it foregrounds the necessity for racial uplift ideology in the Younger family's pursuit of the American Dream, culminating in the occupancy of their new home in the all-white enclave of Clybourne Park. Hansberry also sketches the postblack ethos in her representation of Beneatha Younger, the younger sister of the play's protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, and her allusion to intraracial debates about the false opposition between intellectual and corporeal freedom. In her interrogation of racial uplift ideology and the patriarchy that often underwrites it, Beneatha offers an alternative mode of self-representation built upon the pursuit of intellectual freedom. The chapter highlights the issue at the core of Hansberry's representation: race-based oppression and how it impacts concerns of equal housing access, economic enfranchisement, and African American identity politics.

“‘Of Remarkable Omens in My Favor’: Olaudah Equiano, Two Identities, and the Cultivation of a Literary Economic Exchange” by Edward L. Robinson Jr., explores the The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) as a work that seeks to “ingeniously” cultivate a relationship between two identities and two audiences—African and European. “For Equiano,” Robinson writes in his essay, “the narrative stands as a careful negotiation of the complexities that are critical in cultivating socio-political and economic capital in the commercial Atlantic.” Again the past, real or imaginary, plays an important role in seeking legitimacy with multiple audiences. As a way to connect with his European audiences, Equiano scripted an African past,— adopted the European name Gustavus Vassa in reference to Swedish King Gustav I, and succeeded in combining both narratives. Imbued with the values and ideals representative of both communities in the Atlantic, his narrative becomes a voice against racial injustice and slavery.

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.

This chapter considers the ways in which the South has been represented by and through several publics, from academics to rappers to filmmakers. It begins with a discussion of the place of region in African American identity, and then uncovers the discursive black South as it has been produced and consumed by myriad publics, especially African American publics. By traversing the black South(s) popularized in the American imagination by literature, art, dance, film, music, and television, the chapter elucidates the narratives emergent from and in the name of the black South and the function of such narratives for black identities historically and contemporarily. Finally, it shows how processes of place accomplishment and regional representation inform post-soul southern identity.

This chapter frames Alice Childress's 1969 teleplay Wine in the Wilderness, as a counternarrative to cultural memory's master narrative of the African American Freedom Struggle era. Childress explores the intersections of class, race, and gender in Wine in the Wilderness's representations, situating the Harlem Civil Disturbance of 1965 during which the play takes place as a site enabling productive reflection on and reconsideration of the rhetorical and representational strategies underwriting some Black Arts cultural expression and, by extension, African American identity. The chapter argues that Wine in the Wilderness troubles blackness and disrupts the standard ideas associated with it, consequently creating a new meaning. The play's counternarrative constitutes black solidarity and black consciousness through its critique of the sometimes reductive gender and class ideologies underwriting certain strains of the Black Arts Movement's cultural production alongside an alternate history of black protest led by African American fraternal organizations.