African American culture and historical development

¶ … connect the African cultural roots and the Black experience in America. What experience would you gain from viewing a traditional African community in modern America that retains strong cultural roots? (South Carolina!)

To view a traditional African community, such as exists in South Carolina, within the context of an America environment, is not simply to see a remnant in what is, to many African-Americans, a lost part of their past or a foreign culture. Rather it is an illustration to the culture at large, given the profound cultural differences of this community, that 'black' that is experience of color is not a seamless cloth. The African-American experience of slavery is a unique and profound one, of history and the overcoming of struggle. However, unlike, for instance, the experience of American Jews, or Africans, as illustrated at the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, the experience of a cohesive immigrant group, however oppressed, is profoundly different than that of an enslaved, transported minority that is merged and stripped of its culture and linguistic coherence and must create a new one, through music such as jazz, and the foods and words and dialects in combination with Africans they would never have encountered, had slavery not occurred.

Question 2. Compare and contrast the modern African and modern African-American experience/perspective. Where can a student find this information first-hand and connect with the modern African-American experience?

The modern African experience is one of nation building. As witnessed at the African-American Museum of Philadelphia Exploring Africa at a temporary Exhibit during February 2004, it is one of overcoming the legacy of colonialism, and occasional tribal warfare in the face of regional conflicts. But he modern African-American experience, as noted by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man, is how to define one's selfhood in a nation that constantly attempts to erase one's identity as anything positive. The colonialism upon the African-American psyche is psychological as well as physical, and one must be of the oppressing nation as well as resist it, as in post-colonial literature and art of the African subcontinent.

Question 3. Compare and contrast the historical African and historical African-American experience/perspective. Where can a student find this information first-hand and connect with the historical African-American experience?

Through museum exhibits one may physically connect with artifacts from various periods of American history. Through narratives of great Black Americans such as Equiano, Douglass, and Dubois one may draw not a seamless line, but does an intellectual legacy of experience and thought of the history of slavery for the reader and student. And many African-Americans haven gone so far as to retrace the infamous 'middle passage' to see what it was like, to experience slavery, giving them a physical sense of what slavery was like.

Do not see "Gone with the Wind," in other words, or even digest the experience of slavery through fictionalized prose or television, such as "Roots." Instead, go to the preserved plantations and see the vastness of what was once cotton fields, feel the heat upon one's neck that slaves labored through all day long, and visit reconstructed examples of slave shacks and shanty towns, imagining the music that slaves used to communicate and keep themselves psychologically strong through the horrors they endured.

4. Briefly describe places of cultural significance (Specific museums/events/locations) to study contributors and movements involved in Black intellectual and political recognition/emancipation.

The Washington Monument may seem like the most obvious locale, as it is the physical location of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream," speech. Yet far more profound might be the ordinary experiences chronicled in The National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, OH. There, there is a "Permanent Exhibit: From Victory To Freedom: Afro-American Life in the Fifties," that chronicles the bravery of ordinary African-Americans during the civil rights movement and the struggle to move what was still seen as the promised land of the industrialized North. In August 200 at that same museum, devoted to the African-American experience, there was a "Temporary Exhibit: The Legacy of American Slavery," that attempted to connect this second journey to the first, of African-Americans fleeing the South.

Question 5 Link between intellectual inquiry and community service and development in African-American Culture. What kinds of community service opportunities are available to connect African-American Culture to a non-African-American seeking to understand Afro centricity? RE: African/American Indian (Seminole Tribe) Cultural development with some traditional African Cultural blending.

Community service may be used to create bonds within community members, but also build bridges and create understanding between different communities. American Indians of the Seminole tribes, long ago in the national past, engaged in economic trade and activities, such as intermarriage, that created ties between these oppressed groups. Afro centric identification is another connection between Indian and African-Americans, however, because both groups have attempted to recreate fallen nations upon the land, in different fashions, after the linguistic ties and cultural bonds were dissolved through the now-dominant European culture's oppression.