Odysseys Home


Book Description

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures. George Elliott Clarke identifies African-Canadian literature's distinguishing characteristics, argues for its relevance to both African Diasporic Black and Canadian Studies, and critiques several of its key creators and texts. Scholarly and sophisticated, the survey cites and interprets the works of several major African-Canadian writers, including André Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris, and M. Nourbese Philip. In so doing, Clarke demonstrates that African-Canadian writers and critics explore the tensions that exist between notions of universalism and black nationalism, liberalism and conservatism. These tensions are revealed in the literature in what Clarke argues to be – paradoxically – uniquely Canadian and proudly apart from a mainstream national identity. Clarke has unearthed vital but previously unconsidered authors, and charted the relationship between African-Canadian literature and that of Africa, African America, and the Caribbean. In addition to the essays, Clarke has assembled a seminal and expansive bibliography of texts – literature and criticism – from both English and French Canada. This important resource will inevitably challenge and change future academic consideration of African-Canadian literature and its place in the international literary map of the African Diaspora.




Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity


Book Description

The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have historically been reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Robert S. Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the other's political vision. He also examines Delany and Douglass's debates in relation to their own writings and to the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though each saw himself as the single best representative of his race, Douglass has been accorded that role by history--while Delany, according to Levine, has suffered a fate typical of the black separatist: marginalization. In restoring Delany to his place in literary and cultural history, Levine makes possible a fuller understanding of the politics of antebellum African American leadership.




All Bound Up Together


Book Description

The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Mart...




Freemasonry, Greek Philosophy, the Prince Hall Fraternity and the Egyptian (African) World Connection


Book Description

Freemasonry is a system of learning that has been recognized as?a?product of western civilization, however what is not told is the influences by people of African descent. This book describes the contributions to freemasonry from the ancient African civilizations of Egypt, Nubia and pre Islamic Arabia. It is designed to give the reader a deeper understanding of its origins as well as its connection to world civilizations and world religion, all of which has an African presence. This book will also looks at the universe of African American Masonic organizations from the early 18th century to the 20th century America, which ranged from the origins of prince hall freemasonry to Black Nationalist and esoteric religious sects like the Moorish Science Temple of America, the UNIA and several other offshoots. Contrary to prior accounts, African American Freemasonry was concerned with far more than simply acknowledgement and respectability. The book will demonstrate that Freemasonry played a critical role in, history, politics and African American social life. I discuss such topics as the impact of Greek philosophy on western civilization, the rise of Islam and its impact on the African continent and finally the grandeur and accomplishments of the moors of Spain. African people have been at the very core of this rich foundation. In addition I discuss the comparisons between the ancient Egyptian civilization and modern day freemasonry. I explore its symbolism as well as the esoteric foundations that freemasonry relies so heavily upon. Once freemasonry reach the western hemisphere it became a tool for influencing Europe's elite. Moreover, my research covers the history of the knight's of Europe and the origins of?european chivalry and how Arabic poetry played an important role in its establishment. Additional topics include Napoleon Bonaparte, The mystic shrine and the foundations of Orientalism.




Islam and the Americas


Book Description

"A tour de force that underwrites and shifts the petrified image of Islam disseminated by mainstream media."--Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity "Gives us an entirely different picture of Muslims in the Americas than can be found in the established literature. A complex glimpse of the rich diversity and historical depth of Muslim presence in the Caribbean and Latin America."--Katherine Pratt Ewing, editor of Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the United States since 9/11 "Finally a broad-ranging comparative work exploring the roots of Islam in the Americas! Drawing upon fresh historical and ethnographic research, this book asks important questions about the politics of culture and globalization of religion in the modern world."--Keith E. McNeal, author of Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean In case studies that include the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past three centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims’ lived experiences and examine the ways Islam has been shaped in the "Muslim minority" societies in the New World, including the Gilded Age’s fascination with Orientalism, the gendered interpretations of doctrine among Muslim immigrants and local converts, the embrace of Islam by African American activist-intellectuals like Malcolm X, and the ways transnational hip hop artists re-create and reimagine Muslim identities. Together, these essays challenge the typical view of Islam as timeless, predictable, and opposed to Western worldviews and value systems, showing how this religious tradition continually engages with local and global issues of culture, gender, class, and race.




Faithful Account of the Race


Book Description

The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans. Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counter narratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.




Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry


Book Description

Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas.




The New Negro


Book Description

A portrait of the vibrant world of 1920s Harlem, with writings by Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Walter White, and more. The Harlem Renaissance was a landmark period in African American history—a time when black poets, musicians, intellectuals, civil rights activists, and others changed the social and cultural landscape in enduring ways. Its influence went far beyond the confines of uptown New York City, as it incorporated voices from the Great Migration, in which African Americans moved north in vast numbers; and elevated artists and thinkers who would become iconic figures in not only Black history, but also American history. Now considered the definitive work of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro features fiction, poetry, and essays that shaped the era. “A book of unusual interest and value.” —The New York Times “[Locke was] the godfather of the Harlem Renaissance.” —Publishers Weekly “Alain Locke is a critical—and complex—figure in any discussion of African-American intellectual history.” —Kirkus Reviews




African American Review


Book Description

As the official publication of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association of America, African American review promotes an exchange among writers and scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who hold diverse perspectives of African American literature and culture.