Jamaicans’ National Identity Phillips, Rupert
The international journal of religion and spirituality in society,
2014, Volume:
4, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper will discuss the relationship between religion and national identity in Jamaica. Pan-Africanists argue that slavery created a feeling of racial identity among Negroes in Jamaica. Though, ...the feeling of religious identity that Christianity created among West Africans in Jamaica has been missed, negated, or put on the periphery by this model. This paper discusses two main points: (a) structural Christianizing of Negroes in Jamaica; and (b) how did Negroes actively incorporate European Christianity in their lives? To answer these questions, I reviewed the works of three well-recognized black Jamaican scholars: Horace Campbell, Pan-Africanist; Aggrey Brown, black power advocate; and Don Robotham, a Marxist and black working-class advocate. I argue that, through education and practice, Christianity provided the unifying concept of a Creator who designed and upheld the universe; subsequently, a national community among polytheist West Africans and/or Negroes in Jamaica was created. This paper also posit: (a) a counter-discourse to conventional black Anglophone Caribbean and Jamaican scholarship that suggests that race is the source of black Jamaicans’ national identity; (b) an essay on ideas and interpretations of European Christianity in Jamaica covering the period 1754-1854; (c) that Nonconformist European Christianity deserves a primary place in the larger project of discovering the national identity in Jamaica; and (d) that this collective birthright of black Jamaicans and deserves to be broadly known. The paper is significant because it adds to the black slave literature about the emergence of primarily tribal West Africans into a cohesive, collective identity as Jamaicans under European slavery in the New World. Implications of this paper include the following discussion: current black, English-speaking Caribbean/Jamaican views and scholarly works are monolithic or one-sided on the subject of the Caribbean/Jamaican identity. What is specifically ignored or negated in the literature is the civilizing influence that European Christianity provided in Jamaica.
Although overt repression has been studied extensively (e.g., mass arrests), there have been no rigorous investigations of covert repressive action (CRA; e.g., electronic and physical surveillance). ...To better understand the latter behavior, the author uses new data about U.S. domestic intelligence activity directed against a Black Nationalist organization in Detroit, Michigan, during the late 1960s and early 1970s (N = 3,136, by neighborhood-month). In line with existing research, evidence reveals that CRA responds to dissent, lagged repression, and the level of economic development within a neighborhood. Differing from existing literature, however, results also disclose that CRA responds to where dissidents live and, most important, in accordance to the racial characteristics of the neighborhood within which potential targets are located. Wiretaps and tails are thus prompted by numerous factors, but the identity of challengers (i.e., political "profiling") proves to be an essential part of the explanation.
The UPWA's District 1 had long been recognized as a leader within a wider union that was considered among the most activist-oriented in the country on issues of civil rights and anti-discrimination ...and in fostering democratic structures among its rank-and-file workers.3 But as Brown's narrative indicates, there were limits to the reach of these policies as the 1950s proceeded.4 In a more recent recollection that appears in an autobiographical film about his life Brown reflected positively on his brief UPWA experiences.5 Such reflections were complex. Together, Brown and Durham became pivotal figures in the union's program department and anti-discrimination (A/D) campaigns operated out of Chicago through the mid-1950s and helped form a black caucus movement within the union-that eventually helped get African American UPWA Wilson Plant leader (and future U.S. congressman) Charles Hayes elected director of the local District 1 of the union.6 Brown recalled how through his UPWA work, he "learned the politics of organization." The labor movement was becoming more confined within the strictures of the world's Cold War racial order-which demanded obedience to the interests of the capitalist West above all, no matter their level of engagement with civil rights measures or racial reforms.8 Such a conflicting trajectory is at least partly reflected in recollections of Richard Durham by diverse UPWA figures from the period. Through his work with the unions paper and program departments, Durham helped promote the work of acclaimed left-nationalist African American authors like John Oliver Killens who wrote the novel Youngblood (1954)-a book about southern racial violence and interracial working class solidarities.15 Such diverse activities are found in the rich archive of the UPWA Papers and manuscript collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Northeastern Illinois area libraries and archives, and through oral histories found in these locations.
Population of African American Social Scientists The four African American social scientists in this study are scholars, who (1) have lived since the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated ...public schools were unconstitutional, (2) have earned a doctor of philosophy degree in an area of the social sciences, (3) have substantial academic training or teaching experiences in colleges and/or universities in the United States, and (4) have written about education and one of the study's central issues (e.g., racial integration or separation) and/or had their words or ideas on any of these issues presented, whether by themselves or others, in written form (e.g., books, professional journals, newspapers) since that Supreme Court decision. Several authors (Pinkney, 1976; Anderson, 1988) have reported that during this period, and in fact from the beginning of Reconstruction in the 1860s to the end of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the underlying sentiment that informed the beliefs and practices of the majority of African Americans in regards to race relations was desegregation and integration.
This essay addresses the rhetorical constitution of identity. Analyzing the rhetoric of Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple of America, I suggest these discourses rhetorically transformed black ...Americans’ identity to a people resignified as a unique racial and religious community—Moorish Americans. My analysis extends the concept of “minor rhetoric” by illustrating how resistant identities can be constituted. The analysis posits Ali’s discourse as a minor rhetoric of black nationalism capable of stuttering the language of the larger white culture as well as other protest rhetorics.
Holcomb's 2007 study--Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance--traces the intersections between the New Negro author's Black nationalism, Marxism, and sex ...radicalism. Here, he articulates the way in which work by Alan M. Wald, William J. Maxwell, as well as other scholars showed that a critical kinship--a sexing of the Left--existed for his own interpretive project.
Relevant Books
The Journal of Pan African studies,
07/2017, Volume:
10, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The Sidis comprise scattered communities of people of African descent who travelled and settled along the western coast of India, mainly in Gujarat, but also in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sri ...Lanka and in Sindh (Pakistan) as a result of the Indian Ocean trade from the 13th to 19th centuries....the work draws from extant scholarly research and documentary sources to provide a comprehensive study of people of African descent in India and sheds new light on their experiences by employing an interdisciplinary approach across fields of history, art, anthropology, religion, literature and oral history; it provides an analysis of their negotiations with cultural resistance, survivals and collective memory....the author tells the important narrative of Weeksville's growth, disappearance, and eventual rediscovery, but also highlights the stories of the people who created the community, drawing on maps, newspapers, census records, photographs, and the material culture of buildings and artifacts....the author traces the shifting intersections between the Black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War, and by the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden which served as an official embassy for the organization and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary....Halpern points out that although the causes of the 'demise' of apartheid in 1990 were many, "primary among them was the powerful visual imagery that revealed the naked brutality of South Africa's system of racial oppression to concerned people around the world" (p. 20).
African Americans underuse counseling services because of factors such as cultural mistrust, stigma, and culturally incongruent treatment interventions. As a result, this population relies on ...informal healing networks. The foundations of these networks have been outlined within the professional literature. However, limited attention has been given to the indigenous healing methods used by African Americans in lieu of counseling. This article explores the conceptual, diagnostic, and treatment strategies of the indigenous healing system, Yorùbá‐based Ifá.
