African Diaspora Outside the U.S.

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Article

Algarín, Miguel  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Miguel Algarín was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His family emigrated from Puerto Rico to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, when he was nine years old. The Lower East Side's Latin urban landscape served as the foundation for his literary career. Algarín obtained his B.A. in romance languages from the University of Wisconsin in 1963 and his M.A. in English literature from Pennsylvania State University in 1965. He completed his doctoral studies in comparative literature at Rutgers University. He served as an instructor at Brooklyn College and New York University before becoming an assistant professor and chair of the Puerto Rican Studies department at Rutgers University. He is currently a professor emeritus at Rutgers.

While Algarín is a popular educator he is best known as one of the most active authors in the Puerto Rican poetic movement that flourished in New York City in the ...

Article

Amo, Anton Wilhelm  

Belinda Cooper

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Anton Wilhelm Amo, brother of a slave, was brought to Germany from the Gold Coast in 1707 as a gift from the Dutch West India Company to the Dukes August Wilhelm and Ludwig Rudolf von Wolfenbüttel. Although it was the fashion at the time in Europe to make blacks servants or clowns, the dukes raised and educated Amo as a nobleman. They then sent him to the university in Halle, where he became acquainted with Enlightenment thinkers such as Christian Wolff, Christian Thomasius, John Locke, and René Descartes. His first work, published in 1729 and now lost, concerned the rights of Africans in Europe. Amo received his doctorate in 1734 with a thesis on the duality of body and soul and made his mark as a lecturer in philosophy at the universities in Halle Wittenberg and Jena At a time when many Europeans ...

Article

Arozarena, Marcelino  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Marcelino Arozarena is considered one of the founders of poesía negra, or black poetry, in the Caribbean. Born in Havana, Cuba, he published his first poems in the 1920s in the Havana literary journal La Palabra, directed by Communist leader Juan Marinello. Arozarena's famous poem, “Caridá,” asks why Caridad, a mulatto woman (of both African and European descent), has not shown up at a dance. The poet draws on the techniques of negrista or “blackist” poets, such as mimicking musical rhythms, using jitanjáfora (words whose sounds echo their meanings), and folkloric images of Afro-Cuban music and dance.

Arozarena was part of the first wave of negrista poets, which also included his fellow Cubans Ramón Güirao, Alejo Carpentier, and Regino Pedroso; Puerto Rican poet Palés Matos; and Mexican poet José Zacarías Tallet Together with these authors Arozarena helped spark a literary movement ...

Article

Bellegarde, Dantès  

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Dantès Bellegarde was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1877. His family had long been at the center of Haitian politics. Bellegarde's mother was Marie Boisson and his father Jean-Louis Bellegarde. His maternal great-grandfather, Jacques Ignace Fresnel, was named judge by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution, who became the first leader of the independent state in 1804 and soon proclaimed himself Emperor Jean-Jacques I. This same great-grandfather was later minister of justice under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, who ruled all of Haiti from 1820 to 1843. Bellegarde's paternal grandfather, Jean-Louis de Bellegarde, was a duke and marshal in Haiti's second empire during the rule of Faustin Soulouque, who declared himself emperor and ruled from 1847 to 1859. Bellegarde's aunt, Argentine Bellegarde (1842–1901), was a noted educator and an early feminist. Bellegarde married Cécile Savain (1875–1965 ...

Article

Black Studies  

Claudine Michel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

Black studies and its variants, African American studies, Afro-American studies, African and African American studies, Africana studies, Pan- African studies, diaspora studies, or the more recent Africology, Africa New World studies, and black women diaspora studies, have emerged since the 1960s as full-fledged academic departments in colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. Black studies is the systematic study of the knowledge, thoughts, and modes of being of African people in both their current and historical manifestations. It intersects various methodologies and perspectives; its unit of analysis is the black world, but it also engages white hegemonic powers and their history of exclusion and dominance. Reviewed here are its historical lineages and stages of development as well as the directions and trends of contemporary scholarship.

Article

Blakely, Allison  

Donald Altschiller

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

historian, author, and university professor, was born in Clinton, Alabama, to Ed Walton and Alice Blakely, sharecroppers. When Blakely was young his mother moved north to secure better employment, and he was raised by a great aunt in the coal‐mining town of Preco, near Birmingham. In 1946 his mother returned to Alabama and moved him and his older sister to Oregon, where Alice Blakely had worked as a seamstress and in the Portland shipyards during World War II.

An avid reader since his early years, Blakely particularly enjoyed Russian literature and studied the Russian language in both high school and college. His interest in revolutions and popular democracy further stimulated his interest in Russian history. He received a BA from the University of Oregon in 1962 where he majored in history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa He also graduated as a Distinguished Military Graduate in the ...

Article

Burch, Charles Eaton  

Charlotte Crawford Watkins

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Charles Eaton Burch was born on July 14, 1891, in Bermuda. His early education was in the elementary and secondary schools of Bermuda, and his advanced training was in the United States, at Wilberforce University (B.A., 1914), Columbia University (M.A., 1918), and Ohio State University (Ph.D., 1933). He taught in the academic department of Tuskegee Institute in 1916 and 1917, and from 1918 to 1921 he taught at Wilberforce as an instructor in English. In 1921 he was appointed to the faculty of Howard University, where he served, successively, as assistant professor (1921–1924), associate professor (1924–1936), and professor of English, and as acting head and (from 1933) head of the Department of English until his death on March 23, 1948 In addition to his work as a scholar Burch made two major contributions to Howard University In ...

Article

Carew, Jan  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

One profile of Jan Carew calls him “a prolific and versatile writer who has lived in South and North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe and whose work includes novels, poetry, plays for theater, television, and radio, screenplays, essays, and books for children and young adults.” This is a fitting summary of his diverse career.

Carew was born in a small village in British Guiana (now Guyana), the son of a planter. After graduating from the prestigious Berbice High School, he briefly taught there and then worked from 1940 to 1943 for the British Colonial Civil Service in British Guiana. From 1943 to 1944 he worked for the government of Trinidad and Tobago, before leaving the Caribbean to continue his education.

Carew went first to the United States, where he attended Howard University and Western Reserve University now Case Western Reserve University and then to Europe where ...

Article

Clarke, John Henrik  

Christopher Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

scholar and activist, was born John Henry Clark in Union Springs, Alabama, the first of five children to John Clark and Willella (Willie) Mays, sharecroppers. Later Clarke changed the spelling of his name, dropping the “y” in Henry and replacing it with “ik” after the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. He also added an “e” at the end of Clarke.

Clarke s great grandmother Mary who lived to be 108 inspired him to study history The young Clarke sat on her lap listening to stories and it was through her he later said that he first became aware of the word Africa Clarke grew up in the Baptist church and wanted to satisfy his intellectual curiosity regarding the Bible and its relationship to African people Like a detective he searched the Bible looking for an image of God that looked like him His dissatisfaction with what he found later ...

Article

Congresso Afro-Brasileiro  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Congresso Afro-Brasileiro is not a permanent organization. Instead, the assemblies consisted of a series of conferences in which Brazilians from various fields gathered to exchange knowledge and discuss the African influence on the history and culture of Brazil. White and black Brazilian clergy, artists, students, intellectuals—anyone who had expertise on Afro-Brazilian issues—discussed such diverse topics as cuisine, folklore, music, linguistics, religion, and the history of the African presence in the country.

Organized mainly by Gilberto Freyre, the first Congresso Afro-Brasileiro took place in Recife in 1934, and was sponsored independently of the government. Some of the works presented at this first meeting were “The Slave Trade and England” by Jovelino de M. Carvalho, Jr.; “Xang “ by Edison Carneiro; “Deformations of the Bodies of Runaway Negroes” by Gilberto Freyre, and “Musicality of the Black Slave in Brazil” by Nair de Andrade.

The second ...

Article

Cordero, Roque  

Roanne Edwards

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

During the 1960s Roque Cordero gained international recognition as an innovative composer of contemporary classical music. He has received numerous awards for his compositions, including the Koussevitzky International Recording Award in 1974 for his Violin Concerto (1962). Although he employs modern compositional techniques, he strongly identifies with his Panamanian heritage and has sought to create music with both Afro-indigenous character and universal appeal.

Cordero was born and raised in Panama City, Panama. As a teenager, he revealed a talent for musical composition and won several local prizes. In 1939 he wrote his first notable work for orchestra, the Capricho Interiorano. Impressed by the bold experimentalism of the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, he aspired to a Western musical education and in 1943 enrolled on a scholarship at the University of Minnesota in the United States. After extensive musical study with composer Ernst Krenek and conductor Dimitri ...

Article

Crogman, William H(enry)  

Melvin D. Kennedy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Crogman was born in Philipsburg on Saint Martin, Leeward Islands, on May 5, 1841. Little is known of his first few years except that he was never a slave. He was orphaned at twelve and shortly thereafter was befriended by B. L. Boomer, of a New England shipowning family. Boomer took young Crogman to his home in Middleboro, Massachusetts. In 1855, at the age of fourteen, Crogman began an eleven-year career at sea on one of the Boomer ships. During this period he visited many ports in Europe, India, and South America. These experiences had a profound effect on the keenly observant young man.

With Boomer's encouragement Crogman began preparations in 1866 to secure an education Two years later he entered Pierce Academy in Middleboro He completed with distinction the four year course in English French and bookkeeping in half the time normally required His ...

Article

Education in Latin America and the Caribbean  

Alberto Arenas

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The history of formal education in Latin America and the Caribbean is also the history of how blacks were systematically denied access to educational institutions and blocked from helping to form the new social organizations that emerged after the end of Colonial Rule. The story of Afro–Latin American education falls into three periods: the colonial period that continued into the nineteenth century, the postabolition period that began in the 1830s in most countries, and the contemporary period that began in the 1970s.

Article

Freeman, Martin Henry  

Russell W. Irvine

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

educator and emigrationist, was born in bucolic Rutland, Vermont. Freeman's life can be divided into two periods: his thirty-seven-year residence in America and his twenty-five-year stay in Liberia, Africa. In Rutland, he attended the predominantly white East Parish Congregational Church, whose pastor recognized Freeman's precocity and volunteered to prepare him for college. Freeman was accepted into Middlebury College and graduated class salutatorian in 1849. He taught briefly in Boston before accepting an invitation to join the faculty of the newly established Allegheny Institute and Mission Church (later Avery College) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1850. Freeman's appointment at the first state-chartered degree-granting institution for blacks distinguished him as the first college-educated black professor in America. In recognition of his advanced study in mathematics and natural philosophy, Middlebury College voted to award him an M.A. degree in 1852. In 1856 when Avery College s first white president ...

Article

Golden, Lily  

Adam W. Green

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

academic and writer, was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Oliver John Golden, an African American agronomist, and Bertha Bialek, an English teacher of Polish-Jewish descent. Communist sympathizers who found life in America as an interracial couple extremely difficult, Oliver and Bertha led an expedition of sixteen African American agricultural experts to the Soviet Union in 1931 in an attempt to assist the USSR's agricultural development, specifically the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. Shortly after Golden's birth, her parents were offered work at universities in Tashkent, capital of the then-named Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1937 the family was given an ultimatum by the Soviet government to leave the country or renounce their American citizenship As Golden later wrote Neither my father nor my mother was inclined to take their newly born child back to the racism and intolerance that they had experienced in the United States p 15 ...

Article

Golden, Oliver John  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

a trained agronomist who organized a team to help the Soviet Union develop its economy, and remained in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic until his death, was born on a cotton farm in Yazoo County, Mississippi, the son of Hilliard and Catherine Golden.

Golden's father was born in Mississippi in 1844, to parents born in North Carolina, while his mother was born in Texas, to a father born in North Carolina and a mother born in Virginia. He had older sisters born between the years 1862 and 1886 (Mary, Martha, Elizabeth, Rebecca, Biddie, Miriam, Virginia Mamie), and younger brothers and sisters born between 1891 to 1900 (Willie, Lily, and Viola). Golden's parents and grandparents had all been enslaved from birth until 1863 After emancipation Hilliard Golden saved money to acquire a substantial cotton farm but ...

Article

Gonzaga, Chiquinha  

Joy Elizondo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Chiquinha Gonzaga was born in Rio de Janeiro to an unwed mother of mixed race. After being officially recognized by her father, she received all the trappings of an education befitting the daughter of a military man so that she might serve in the court of Pedro II. After a strict upbringing she married a wealthy commander in Brazil's merchant marines when she was still a teenager; yet, much to her family's chagrin, she swapped an oppressive home life for the bohemian music halls of Rio at the age of eighteen.

Though Gonzaga had performed her first song, “Canção de Pastores,” at a family gathering on Christmas Eve in 1858, her first successful composition, a polka titled “Atraente,” was not published until 1877 In the meantime cut off by her family she managed to build a reputation as a piano teacher and made a living playing in ...

Article

Hall, Stuart  

Leyla Keough

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Stuart Hall, a founder of the New Left and of the interdisciplinary field known as cultural studies, has devoted his career to developing a framework for understanding issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural practice and their practical relationship to contemporary British politics.

Hall was born to upwardly mobile middle-class parents in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1951 he won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College at Oxford University, which he has called “the hub, the motor, that creates Englishness.” He earned a doctoral degree in American literature.

During the 1950s Hall became involved in West Indian and socialist politics. He was a founding member of the New Left Club and its publication Universities and Left Review. This journal merged with social historian E. P. Thompson's The New Reasoner in 1959 and became the New Left Review Hall was its first editor In this journal Hall challenged the failure ...

Article

Hodge, Merle  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Merle Hodge is one of the best-known Caribbean women writers. She was born and raised in Trinidad, and after graduating from high school in 1962 she received the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship to study in England. There she received a B.A. degree in French from University College, London, in 1965, and an M.Phil degree in 1967. Her master's thesis was on the poetry of French Guianese Négritude writer Leon Damas, and she later wrote several more scholarly studies of his work.

After graduation Hodge spent several years working as a baby-sitter and a typist as she traveled across Europe, and during her travels she completed her first novel. Crick Crack, Monkey (1970 tells the story of Tee a young girl who is forced to choose between her mother s family and her father s after her mother s death The choice is ...

Article

Hunt, Ida Alexander Gibbs  

Allison Blakely

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Hunt was born Ida Alexander Gibbs on November 16, 1862, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her father, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, was a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who had achieved great success as an entrepreneur in California and then in British Columbia. In the late 1860s, while he continued business ventures in Canada, he sent the family to live in Oberlin, Ohio, where Ida's mother, the former Maria Alexander, had attended college. Ida completed two degrees at Oberlin College, specializing in English. She received a B.A. degree in 1884 and an M.A. degree in 1892. A classmate and friend in Ida's class of 1884 was Mary Church Terrell, later known as a civil rights leader. Ida's younger sister, Harriet Gibbs Marshall, likewise later became well known as the founder of the Washington, D.C. Conservatory of Music After college Ida Gibbs taught ...