ANTH 3580 - The African Diaspora: Across the Americas

The African Diaspora across the Americas produced by the transatlantic slave trade, has impacted every society in North America, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, and has produced a diverse array of distinctive Black communities and African diasporic cultural practices. These practices include robust forms of cultural resistance to racism and influential critical theories. Studying the African Diaspora across the Americas raises many issues at the cutting edge of anthropological thinking about the nature of identity, belonging, consciousness and tradition, and the co-construction of race and nation. Much of this recent work reconceptualizes an Atlantic World or “Black Atlantic” that is rich with contemporary interconnections and movements of people between points in the Americas, Europe, and Africa that complicate earlier notions of unidirectional influences from Africa to the New World. We will map a dialogue between anthropological work showing connections between different sites of African diasporic culture and the political and social concerns and consciousness of African diasporic people themselves (not just U.S. African-American, but all of the Americas). This course satisfies WMU Essential Studies Level 3: Connections – Global Perspectives Category.

Credits: 3 hours