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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores
(edited by Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Creating
an Africana Canon
By Louis Reyes Rivera
With regards to compiling and categorizing an Africana Canon . . .
Let us take care that we don't misunderstand the vital need for
the most appropriate canon. In separating, particularly, the
Latino from the Africana canon, we misplace in narrow fashion
our definition of what Joel Washington refers to as an Africana
Heritage grouping, as well as a Pan-African and African-American
definition of self . . .
We should take care to avoid what the Anglo-North American has
done to the term "American" as well as in the creation
of an "hispanic race (sic!).". . .
Let us not forget that Marcus Garvey published a newspaper, The
Black World, in English, Spanish and French editions as a
guide towards understanding what exactly is a Pan-African
context . . .
Consider further inside the definition of an American (i.e.,
African American) the following factor:
There are, roughly speaking, 40 million African Americans living
in the U.S. There are, roughly speaking, 80 million
African Americans living in Brazil. What do you do with
that?
Further, no less than 12% of Mexico is of African
descent. No less than 15% of Ecuador is of African
descent. No less than 50% of both Cuba and the Dominican
Republic are of African descent; no less than 75% of Panama
is of African descent; no less than 30% of Columbia is of
African descent; no less than 26% of Venezuela is of
African descent.
No less than 60% of the total Caribbean is of African descent; no
less than 45% of the people of the three Guyanas (Surinam
included) is of African descent. No less than 40% of Puerto
Ricans will tell you that their lineage includes an African
heritage. Even places like Chile and Argentina
have an African presence in their annals (lest we forget the
works of such personages as Ivan Van Sertima and J.A. Rogers—which, while initially dismissed by Euro-American scholars,
have indeed gained "legitimacy" the more that work is
examined).
In other words, the compilatory work involved in putting such a
canon together would be better served if we do not accept the
North's definitions and categories.
Instead, we should encourage those who (within each
nation-state) propagate their African heritage to add themselves
into the "working" canon.
If we emphasize only the "culture-race group" within
THIS nation-state as the basis for separating, including or
excluding (Latino vs. African," for example), we end up
denying the historical quality that went into creating an
African Diaspora.
By avoiding this pitfall, when we do get to a national
conference, much groundwork would have thus been laid out, since
we took into fullest account both the principle and historical
nature of this particular Diaspora.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 28 November
2011
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