Suicide among African Americans occurs at about half the rate with which it occurs among white Americans. Why is the black rate of suicide so much lower, particularly when one considers the effects of racism and other socio-economic factors on African Americans? One answer that has been offered is that churches within the African-American community have a greater influence than among white Americans and that they provide amelioration of social forces that would otherwise lead to suicide.

To date no other book has provided an in-depth ethnographic study of the buffering effect of the...

Denied its true place in history, the pre-Civil War black press was a forward looking, socially responsible press. Through her analysis of the content of black newspapers and magazines from the 1830s to the 1860s, Frankie Hutton not only presents a prism through which to view the social origins of black journalism in America, but also examines how this little-known ethnic press interfaced with the whole of journalism during the dark ages of the profession. This revisionist evaluation is intended for students, experts, and journalists dealing with ethnic and American studies, especially...

Throughout her novels, Toni Morrison explores the complex interaction of race, class, culture, and gender. This study takes into account both Western and Black traditions to show how Morrison not only denounces the constricting patterns of the dominant culture, but also, through the reversal or subversion of Western stereotypes, harnesses the rich potential for the significance they contain.

While most recent studies of Morrison examine individual works separately, this book concentrates on particular dimensions of Morrison's fiction and explores the continuities and developments from...

Distinguished experts on African development offer their considerable knowledge and background to the coming crisis in Africa. They examine not only development but also related factors such as foreign trade, politics, indigenous traditions, and international relations in order to understand development problems on the continent. It is one of the first volumes since the end of the Cold War to analyze African development, or the lack thereof, that had polarized the developing countries for the past 30 years. Yansane and his contributors present the strengths and weaknesses of various...

Washington provides a detailed guide to the philosophy of Alain Locke, one of the most influential African American thinkers of our time. The work gives special attention to what Washington calls Destiny Studies, an approach which allows a people to concentrate on their past, present, and future possibilities, and to view the experience of a race as a coherent unity, rather than a set of fragmented historical happenings. In providing a broad vision of Locke's ideas, Washington considers the views of Booker T. Washington and his contemporaries, the theories of anthropologists concerning...

In the first book which deals entirely with the subject of time in Africa and the Black Diaspora, Adjaye presents ten critical case studies of selected communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. The essays cover a wide spectrum of manifestations of temporal experience, including cosmological and genealogical time, physical and ecological cycles, time and worldview, social rhythm, agricultural and industrial time, and historical processes and consciousness. The studies confirm the continuity of temporal experience among Africans from pre-colonial times, through the...

A collection of 11 chapters by Nigerian professors, this book covers such issues as the dignity of intellectual labor; how colonial writings on Africa helped Africans decide to become the interpreters of their cultures; what Nigerian playwrights and poets have in common with authors from other parts of the world; the need to write literature in indigenous Nigerian languages; and critical examinations of the themes of victimization, bad governance, and Igbo social behavior as they are handled in select African and Nigerian literary texts. In discussing the issues, the contributors maintain...

Negro-African literature in French is one of a number of appellations most commonly used to describe a body of literary texts written in French by Africans and those of African descent from roughly 1920 onward. Discussing the numerous other terms that have been used to designate the same body of texts (Colonial literature, Black literature, literature of Negritude), Jack explores the complex relationship between how literatures are named and how they are evaluated. The first thorough study of the history and criticism of Negro-African literature in French, this work gives an account of the...

This ground-breaking work brings dance into current discussions of the African presence in American culture. Dixon Gottschild argues that the Africanist aesthetic has been invisibilized by the pervasive force of racism. This book provides evidence to correct and balance the record, investigating the Africanist presence as a conditioning factor in shaping American performance, onstage and in everyday life. She examines the Africanist presence in American dance forms particularly in George Balanchine's Americanized style of ballet, (post)modern dance, and blackface minstrelsy. Hip hop...