Grandpa Cacao

Grandpa Cacao
Author: Elizabeth Zunon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 39
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1681196417

This beautifully illustrated story connects past and present as a girl bakes a chocolate cake with her father and learns about her grandfather harvesting cacao beans in West Africa. Chocolate is the perfect treat, everywhere! As a little girl and her father bake her birthday cake together, Daddy tells the story of her Grandpa Cacao, a farmer from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. In a land where elephants roam and the air is hot and damp, Grandpa Cacao worked in his village to harvest cacao, the most important ingredient in chocolate. "Chocolate is a gift to you from Grandpa Cacao," Daddy says. "We can only enjoy chocolate treats thanks to farmers like him." Once the cake is baked, it's ready to eat, but this isn't her only birthday present. There's a special surprise waiting at the front door . . .

Black is the Journey, Africana the Name

Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Author: Maboula Soumahoro
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2021-09-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509548343

In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence, and amplification of Black life. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, Maboula Soumahoro highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today, and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom. How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives, and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold? This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion.

Palma Africana

Palma Africana
Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 022651627X

“It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: “habitat loss,” “human rights abuses,” “climate change.” The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig’s keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors’ ruminations: Roland Barthes’s suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs’s retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don’t like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig’s Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.

The Africana Worship Book

The Africana Worship Book
Author: Abena Safiyah Fosua
Publisher: Upper Room Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-10
Genre: African American Christians
ISBN: 9780881775457

Completing the series, The Africana Worship Book (Year C), offers the same diversity as the past two volumes with all new materials from new and experienced voices. The Africana Worship Book (Year C), contains new calls to worship, liturgies, prayers, litanies, offertory prayers, doxologies, choral readings, creeds, chants, and benedictions. The compilations are related to Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary. This volume invites the whole church to become open to the fresh movements of God in the midst of corporate worship. The book includes a bound-in CD, making it easy for congregations to reproduce the material for use in worship.

Shaka Rising

Shaka Rising
Author: Luke Molver
Publisher: Story Press Africa
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781946498991

A charismatic young warrior prince emerges from exile to usurp the old order and forge a new, mighty Zulu kingdom.

Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory

Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory
Author: James L. Conyers, Jr.
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1785277219

One critical priority of the discipline of Africana studies is applied memory, specifically, how the record of the culture’s survival and agency reveals usable and reproducible knowledge and behavior. In terms of how Muhammad Ali, as an historical actor, has left an heroic legacy that bequeaths to us a sort of inheritance, the critical task at hand is to systematically explore this historical actor’s life, feats, philosophy, grit, worldview, and even his folkloric antihero to decipher his Africana cultural memory value. At the core of this edited collection is a commitment to enhance the cultural storytelling about Muhammad Ali and to critically itemize the lessons we garner from his life as allegory. The ancestral life is one that is remembered and recalled. The contributors’ research uncovers Ali’s local, national, and global encounters that are legacy worldviews. These perspectives give us direction for mining the critical depth of Ali’s encounters which map his memory in terms of culturally sustaining confidence, self-esteem, reinvention, immortalization, and empathy. These are the fertile seeds of Africana cultural memory which bloom into powerful markers and monuments of an epic life of hyperheroic activity relevant to cultural memory, sports, history, politics, health, and aesthetics.

Discourse on Africana Studies

Discourse on Africana Studies
Author: Scot Brown
Publisher: Diasporic Africa Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2017-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1937306224

Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and Paradigms of Knowledge is both a reader and an introspective tribute, comprised of writings by James Turner and commentary from several of his former students. The book strives to underscore critical connections between multiple dimensions of Turner’s legacy (as scholar, activist, institution-builder, teacher, and mentor), while also aiming to contribute to the growing historicized literature on the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The contributors to this book hope to influence this early phase in Black/Africana Studies historiography and provide a resource for discourse on the future of the discipline.

Frantz Fanon, My Brother

Frantz Fanon, My Brother
Author: Joby Fanon
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739180495

The short, but remarkable, life of Frantz Fanon has attracted several biographers, all of whom have relied on Fanon’s older brother, Joby, for information on Fanon’s early life. Dissatisfied with these portrayals, Joby decided to tell the story of his brother in his own words with a richness of detail not found in any other work. Translated into English by Daniel Nethery, this is an intimate, passionate, and very human account of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Frantz Fanon stands as one of the most uncompromising critics of racism and colonialism. His experience growing up as French colonial subject taught him to be fearless in the defense of his ideals. At the age of seventeen he left his home island of Martinique to fight in Europe against Nazi Germany. After the war he studied medicine and wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. He practiced as a psychiatrist in Algeria and put his medical skills and literary talent in the service of the struggle for Algerian independence and African liberation. He died in 1961, one week after the publication of his classic text, The Wretched of the Earth. He was thirty-six years old.

An Introduction to Africana Philosophy

An Introduction to Africana Philosophy
Author: Lewis R. Gordon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-05-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521858854

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy.