Carlos Moore and Abdias do Nascimento are both prominent scholars and activists. Moore is an ethnologist and political scientist with two doctorates from the prestigious University of Paris, France. He was banished from his native country Cuba for 30 years. Nascimento is a prominent Afro- Brazilian scholar and artist. He is considered to be a historical leader of the Black Movement in Brazil. Their work had an enormous contribution to the societies of Brazil and Cuba. They worked hard and often sacrificing their freedom hoping to put an end to racial discrimination in their countries of origin in South America. They spend much of their adult lives fighting for racial justice in their native countries.
Carlos Moore was born in 1942 in Cuba. In 1958 at the peak of the civil war between Castro and dictator Batista 15-year-old Moore moved along with his family to U.S hoping to find a better life far away from discrimination and prejudice. In his book Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba: A Memoir (2008) Moore mentions: “For me, “America” rhymed with good government, good schools, well-paying jobs, affluence, unlimited opportunities. It symbolized not just power and money but a place where I could finally be treated decently” (Moore 15). After only two years Moore got to meet with Fidel Castro, and realized that his place was in Cuba fighting for freedom from racial oppression. Moore perceived the U.S as an imperialist country which attempted to dominate Cuba. As the revolution started he went back to Cuba and quickly realized that in spite of all of the hopeful things about ending racism the revolutionary leaders were saying, most of it was lies. Even though Castro successfully fought for Cuba’s ind...
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... in the cities resulted in formation of a vibrant, African-based popular culture. African-based dance and music were incorporated into new musical forms. Id didn’t last long till Cuban authorities in several countries banned the black societies from dancing, drumming, or parading publicly on religious holidays. Brazilian authorities outlawed Capoeira in 1890 and African-based religions became a target of police repression (Andrews 122). Admission and participation in the world of the middle class therefore required rejection of African-based culture and being fully devoted to the European modes of civilized and progress, although even total submission didn’t guarantee being free from racial discrimination. Eventually Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay gave rise to black political parties. The Great Depression brought an end to the export boom.
Fidel Castro entered Havana, Cuba and took his place as Prime Minister in January of 1959, just after the fall of the Batista regime. Within days, many of the Cuban upper class began exiting the island, wary of losing their socioeconomic status and possibly their lives (Leonard 13). Castro’s radical new policies appealed to most of the suppressed lower class seeking change, but the middle sector “became disillusioned with their new leader” and soon comprised the majority of the Cuban refugees in Miami, Florida (Leonard 3). Beginning in December 1960 and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, over 14,000 of those refugees wou...
Professor Colin Palmer, author of “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” is a Jamaican-bred historian.1 He studied at the University College of the West Indies/London and the University of Wisconsin.1 Dr. Palmer has taught history classes at Oakland University and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and has served as the Chair of the Department of History for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.1 Additionally, Palmer has written numerous books on Black culture, including Slaves of the White God: Black in Mexico, 1570 – 1650, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700 – 1739 and Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America.1 Based on his upbringing, schooling and work experience, Professor Colin Palmer is more than qualified to write about the modern African diaspora.
Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti protested law from Guatemala to Spain. His visions of how society should be, changed both literature and politics everywhere. One of his most famous works, “Our America” gave people insight to his ideal view of society.
De La Fuente, A. (2008). The new afro-cuban cultural movement and the debate on race in
From the 1500s to the 1700s, African blacks, mainly from the area of West Africa (today's Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Dahomey, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon) were shipped as slaves to North America, Brazil, and the West Indies. For them, local and tribal differences, and even varying cultural backgrounds, soon melded into one common concern for the suffering they all endured. Music, songs, and dances as well as remembered traditional food, helped not only to uplift them but also quite unintentionally added immeasurably to the culture around them. In the approximately 300 years that blacks have made their homes in North America, the West Indies, and Brazil, their highly honed art of the cuisine so treasured and carefully transmitted to their daughters has become part of the great culinary classics of these lands. But seldom are the African blacks given that recognition.
Originally a dictator ran Cuba: President Fulgencio Batista, who was an ally to the United States. Cuba during this time enjoyed a healthy urban middle class, and its citizens enjoyed some degree of freedom without a police state. Many other countries seemed a lot more likely to revolt, because economically and developmentally, Cuba seemed stable. However, the United States’ role and control of Cuba’s economy started to take its toll on the “peasants”. In 1953, the United States owned many of the major entities, such as 50% of the railroad. Just as much development as there was in the urban areas there was a lack thereof in the rural areas. Not just economically, Cubans started to resent the image of Sin City that Americans gave the country. Cuba was a popular tourist spot where Americans came to behave badly. Castro’s success came from these opposite sides of distaste for the United States, the peasants economically and the middle class socially & nationally. Castro was not originally a socialist; he was a nationalist first. However when he attacks Moncada Barracks, he is arrested and exiled to Mexico City. During this time his failures are turned into “successes” through propaganda. Castro meets with Che Guevara in Mexico City and when he returns, he purges the military of 483 Batista loyalists and enacts land reforms and nationalizes US
According to Omi and Winant, the term race can be defined as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” From their framework of racial formation and concept of racial projects, Omi and Winant asserts that race is a matter of social structure and cultural representation that has been intertwined to shape the nature of racism. Racism has been seen since the events of early English colonization of the indigenous people and the racialization of African Americans through slavery, all in which the United States is molded upon as a nation. Thus, this social structure of domination has caused European colonials and American revolutionists to create racialized representations, policies, and structures in order to oppress indigenous and black populations in their respective eras.
Race has no biological meaning. There is only one human race; there are no subspecies, no single defining characteristic, traits, or even gene, separates one “race” from another. Instead of being a biological concept, race is a social construct, and a relatively modern one at that. It was created to give light-skinned Europeans an advantage by making the white race superior and all others inferior. Throughout its history, the concept of race has served this purpose well.
Imagine living in a world at which you are harassed and abused just because of the color of your skin. Since the beginning of America’s existence, Whites have had this strong hate towards the black population. The whites wanted to continue to have the power and control in their hands. In order for them to achieve this, the white southerners came up with the Jim Crow laws to prevent the African Americans from achieving their god given right of being free and equal. This did not end the African hope of becoming equal. After many years of mistreatment, African Americans knew that change in society was necessary. The members of the black population have been enslaved, beaten, abused, neglected and just taken advantage of, since the end of the civil war, even into present times, African Americans have struggled for equality and rights that white Americans often take for granted. Arguably, no post-war struggle was larger or more significant than the movement to eliminate the Jim Crow laws from existence in the South. As a large portion of the Civil Rights movement, many works are dedicated to the efforts put forth and the ensuing results, including “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka”, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, “Black Revolution”, “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” and the act from Rosa Parks.
When considering what the African diaspora is, there is one period of time that people commonly refer to. This period of time is the Atlantic Slave Trade. While not the only diaspora of the African people in history, the Atlantic Slave Trade is most commonly thought of due to the scale at which Africans were being emigrated, with around 10-15 million Africans being brought over to the Americas, as well as the effect it has on us today. When looking at the experiences of Africans, they greatly differed dependent on where they landed. These experiences affected later generations of Africans, forcing them to adopt their own culture based on their surroundings and what they were accustomed to from Africa.
The inception of the Pan-African movement was motivated by colonialism and racism faced by African people living in Europe, West Indies and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Through this, leaders of African states originated this movement to unite people of African descent to fight against racism and colonialism (Schraeder, 2000:126). The Pan-African movement was initiated by significant figures such as William Dubois and Marcus Garvey. The concept of this movement started outside of Africa. Africa was later included into this movement as it became the continent of concern of the movements vision. The African demand for colonization to end erupted a war between Africa and its colonizers. This war indicated a certain awareness and importance of uniting people of Africa together which is the initial Pan-African vision. (Schraeder, 2000:127)
In the slippery terrain created by globalization and cultural brokering, contemporary art made in Africa (and its diasporas) has enjoyed a steady growth in interest and appreciation by Western audiences during the last few decades (Kasfir, 2007). Several biennials, triennials, and scholarly works attest to that, with much of its impact owed to the figure of Okwui Enwezor. However, seamlessly uniting diverse African artists under the untrained Western gaze for the commercialism of the international art circuit – notwithstanding their different cultural contexts and the medium in which they work – is bound to create problems. Enwezor’s and other authors’ sophisticated publications and curatorial works show both the vitality and issues still to be addressed in this field of study (Ogbechie, 2010).
Black Consciousness has been defined as an attitude of the mind and a way of life. Therefore, the purpose of teaching Black Consciousness was to conquer feelings of black inferiority and replace it with a new solid social identity which encouraged black pride and independence from white oppression. Africans should reject the myths from which Apartheid was conceived, where blacks were depicted as inferior, savage, simple and having a primitive culture which needed to be modernized. Rather blacks should believe in their true identity of being survivors with the utmost human dignity. Black people needed to become aware of their collective power both economically and politically. People of African descent must create their own value system, where they were self-defined not defined by white superiors.
In conclusion, all of these effects might not seem like there so severe and negative however, they all had pretty big part in bringing together the African culture. The warfare that came forth with the Imperialism left unfathomable scars in the nation of Africa, which caused racial obstruction and social distinctions. The cruel treatment of the Imperialist westerners concerning the African laborers are unspeakable and are once and for all, the ideas that the westerners had captured to Africa during the Imperialist era do not dominate the expense of African lives which were given up for European industries.
An overwhelming majority of African nations has reclaimed their independence from their European mother countries. This did not stop the Europeans from leaving a permanent mark on the continent however. European colonialism has shaped modern-day Africa, a considerable amount for the worse, but also some for the better. Including these positive and negative effects, colonialism has also touched much of Africa’s history and culture especially in recent years.