INFO: New Items of Interest

Africa’s Discovery of Europe

by David Northrup

 

 

I just read a very interesting book on Africa’s discovery of Europe written by a professor of History at Boston College. The book gives an overview of the encounters between Europeans and Africans, from 1450 till 1850. It starts with the first contacts between Portuguese sailors and African coastal states in West-Africa and is as much as possible based on sources from Africans.

 

The author doesn’t look at Africa as a victim but rather as an active contributor and partner in the African-European relations. He studies how religion and culture interacted, how sexual relationships came to be, what the effects of new products and technologies were, how politics, economics, culture and religion interacted, etc. (I discovered e.g. that cassava and corn are not indigenous to Africa).

The reader discovers how Africans were an integral part of the globalizing of economical and cultural transactions. Through the life stories of black missionaries, kings, princes, emissaries, traders and slaves we get an insight into the life and times of the first encounters between Europe and Africa. A whole chapter tells us about the stories of Africans who lived in Europe during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and how they lived their lives then. I was surprised to discover how racial mixing in the British Isles didn’t raise many eyebrows in those days, even less in Africa.

We discover that the first encounters were encounters of equal parties, each trying to gain as much as possible from the transaction. Racial stereotypes and racial discrimination were only to take their full and aggressive form in Europe and Africa in the second half of the 18th century, most of all due to the influence of the colonists from the Americas and the justification of colonization and slavery.

In the first centuries of the slave trade it was rather a coincidence that most slaves were black as Africa had a culture of slavery which post medieval Europe didn’t have. Europe bought the slaves Africa had to offer, for a major part to be able to colonize America. Still, in the first centuries of the slave trade, blacks could buy themselves free and becoming colonizers and slave traders. During those first centuries European presence in Africa was also focused on trade (among it slave trade of course) not on the colonization of the land and peoples of Africa.
To all who want to deepen their understanding and knowledge of history between Africa and Europe I recommend to read this book. The author bases his research on primary sources written by mostly Africans and refers to most important works on the topic.

Europe’s history with race is very different compared to that of America, although both sides influenced each other deeply and both regions are becoming more and more alike at the beginning of the 21st century. I’d like to end with a citation I found in this book, it is taken from Frederick Douglass correspondence when travelling in Europe in 1845. It illustrates wonderfully the difference in racial relations in those days: “It is quite an advantage to be a 'nigger' here. I am hardly black enough for the British taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible - I make out to pass for at least half a negro at any rate" Frederick Douglass (1845)

 

 

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New Book! That's the Joint!


The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

(2nd edition)

August 2, 2011 by Routledge – 764 pages

This newly expanded and revised second edition of That's the Joint! brings together the most important and up-to-date hip-hop scholarship in one comprehensive volume. Presented thematically, the selections address the history of hip-hop, identity politics of the "hip-hop nation," debates of "street authenticity," social movements and activism, aesthetics, technologies of production, hip-hop as a cultural industry, and much more. Further, this new edition also includes greater coverage of gender, racial diversity in hip-hop, hip-hop’s global influences, and examines hip-hop's role in contemporary politics.
With pedagogical features including author biographies, headnotes summarizing key points of articles, and discussion questions, That's the Joint!is essential reading for anyone seeking deeper understanding of the profound impact of hip-hop as an intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural movement.

Praise
"Hip-hop, like all living artistic expression, constantly regenerates, turning innovation into convention, ‘datcourse’ into discourse, vernacularisms into commodity or the precious art object. As this second edition of the groundbreaking That’s the Joint! shows, hip-hop scholarship has done the same: moving, grooving, breaking, and sampling the best ideas from an interdisciplinary community theater of writers whose insights chart a vibrant sector of the American musical landscape."
Guthrie  P. Ramsey, Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

"A standard bearer text in Hip Hop Studies. Sweeping in scope and rigorous in analyses."
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American Diaspora Studies and French, Vanderbilt University

Table of Contents

Introduction: Murray Forman

I. Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop: Hip-Hop History and Historiography 
1. The Politics of Graffiti | Craig Castleman
2. Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown | Jeff Chang 
3. B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something With Older R&B Disks and Jive Talking NY DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos | Robert Ford, Jr. 
4. Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth | Nelson George 
5. Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance | Jorge "Fabel" Pabon 
6. Hip-Hop Turns 30: Watcha Celebratin’ For? | Greg Tate

II. No Time For Fake Niggas: Hip-Hop Culture and the Authenticity Debates 
7. Puerto Rocks: Rap, Roots, and Amnesia | Juan Flores
8. It’s a Family Affair | Paul Gilroy 
9. On the Question of Nigga Authenticity | R.A.T. Judy
10. Arabic Hip-Hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre |Usama Kahf 11. Lookin’ for the Real Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto | Robin D.G. Kelley
12. Hip-Hop Chicano: A Separate but Parallel Story | Reagan Kelly
13. Authenticity Within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened With Assimilation | Kembrew McLeod
14. Race…and Other Four-Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity | Gilbert Rodman
15. Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity and the Asian American |Oliver Wang 

III. Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: Hip-Hop, Space and Place 
16. Black Empires, White Desires: the Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop | Davarian Baldwin
17. 'Represent': Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music | Murray Forman
18. Rap’s Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture | Matt Miller 
19. Global Black Self-Fashionings: Hip-Hop as Diasporic Space | Marc D. Perry
20. Hooligans and Heroes: Youth Identity and Hip-Hop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania | Alex Perullo
21. Native Tongues: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop's Global Indigenous Movement | Cristina Verán with Darryl DLT Thompson, Litefoot, Grant Leigh Saunders, Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, and JAAS 

 IV. I’ll be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: Hip-Hop and Gender 
22. I Used to be Scared of the Dick: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity | Andreana Clay
23. Cover Your Eyes as I Describe a Scene so Violent: Violence, Machismo, Sexism, and Homophobia | Michael Eric Dyson and Byron Hurt
24. 'The King of the Streets': Hip Hop and the Reclaiming of Masculinity in Jerusalem’s Shu’afat Refugee Camp | Ela Greenberg
25. Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness | Marc Lamont Hill
26. Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance | Cheryl L. Keyes
27. Hip-Hop Feminist | Joan Morgan
28. Butta Pecan Mamis | Raquel Rivera 

V. The Message: Rap, Politics and Resistance 
29. Intergenerational Culture Wars: Civil Rights vs. Hip Hop | Todd Boyd and Yusuf Nuruddin
30. The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power |Bakari Kitwana
31. Voyeurism and Resistance in Rap Music Videos | Jennifer C. Lena
32. Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads | Mark Anthony Neal
33. My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community and Consciousness | Imani Perry
34. Rise Up Hip-Hop Nation: From Deconstructing Racial Politics to Building Positive Solutions | Kristine Wright 

 VI. Looking for the Perfect Beat: Hip-Hop, Technology and Rap’s Lyrical Arts 
35. Bring It to the Cypher: Hip Hop Nation Language | H. Samy Alim
36. Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip-Hop Sample | Andrew Bartlett
37. Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative | Greg Dimitriadis
38. Dead Prezence: Money and Mortal Themes in Hip-Hop Culture | James Peterson 
39. Sampling Ethics | Joseph Schloss

VII. I Used to Love H.E.R.: Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries 
40. The Rap Career | Mickey Hess
41. The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite | Keith Negus
42. 'I Don’t Like to Dream About Getting Paid': Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul | Christopher Holmes Smith
43. Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism | S. Craig Watkins
44. An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity | Eric K. Watts 

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Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012). He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation(2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), all published by Routledge. Neal hosts the weekly webcast, "Left of Black" in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.