Transcontinental Connections

TRANSCONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS

Exploring Artistic and Intellectual Histories Across the African Diaspora

Start

Quiz Question

Exploring the Diaspora

The beginnings of the diaspora. Where does it begin? Where and at what moment did the original take place? In the interior of the continent? Outside? Within both of these spaces? These legitimate questions oblige us to approach differently the vanishing frontiers, the fraught and problematic temporalities…” Soumahoro - Black is the Journey

The African Diaspora features an incredibly wide variety of cultures and linguistic influences spread across the globe. With a diaspora so expansive, it can be hard to have a global understanding of its many important figures and ideologies. The aim of this interactive project is to provide more education about a few key figures, events and traditions within the diaspora.

Frantz Fanon

• Afro-Caribbean (born in Martinique in 1925, at the time a French colony) Marxist, philosopher, and psychiatrist

• Fanon practiced psychiatry amidst the Algerian revolution, and worked in a French hospital, treating the psychological distress of the soldiers and officers of the French army (some of whom carried out torture to suppress colonial resistance)
• After becoming disillusioned with the French government, Fanon resigned and devoted himself to aiding in the cause for Algerian independence
• Fanon trained nurses for the FLN (National Liberation Front, the principal nationalist movement, edited its newspaper el Moujahid, and contributed to different articles about the movement
• Fanon's most famous works are Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) in 1961.
• He had also written ollections of essays, including A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution Algérienne 1959) and Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution Africaine)
• Black Skin, White Masks discusses ideas including the totality of colonialism, its psychological effects, interracial sexuality, racial identity, and the role of language in colonialism, among other topics

• The Wretched of the Earth discusses in depth revolutionary violence and its relations

to collective identity formation, colonialism within intellectual spheres, and the role of the 'revolutionary masses'

Tsitsi Dangarembga

• Zimbabwean playwright, novelist, and filmmaker born in the town of Mutoko in 1959, into a family of educators
• Lived in England at a young age before returning to Zimbabwe in 1965, for this reason, Dangarembga cites English as her first language as she forgot a large amount of the Shona she had learned. Upon returning to Zimbabwe and entering a mission school, she began to learn Shona again.
• Dangarembga staged a number of plays in Zimababwe at the beginning of her career, working as a teacher before turning completely to writing

• Most famous work is novel Nervous Conditions (1988), a partially autobiographical work and the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman
• Its title was borrowed from Jean-Paul Satre's introduction to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth
• According to Satre, the "nervous condition" of the native is a state of condemnation by the colonizer that amounts to a psychological disorder
• The book is about the narrator Tambudzai's experience in colonial Zimbabwe in the sixties and seventies
• Dangarembga later began studying film and focusing on filmmaking in Germany

• Many of her works reflect on the connections between colonialism and education, and its social implications

Quiz Question

Marcus Garvey

• Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in 1887
• In his teenage and early adult years, Garvey began a series of apprenticeships in Jamaica, studying the printing trade, becoming a unionist, and joining Jamaica’s first nationalist political organization, the National Club
• Between 1910 and 1914, Garvey spent a number of years traveling abroad through Central/South America and Europe, establishing newspapers including Nation (in Limón, Costa Rica) and La Prensa (in Colόn, Panamá). Both newspapers were dedicated towards advancing the black working class, and charted living conditions in United Fruit Company labor compounds

• The Universal Negro Improvement Association was founded by Garvey in Kingston in 1914, and unlike other political organizations, was distinct as rather than being founded upon a specific policy platform, its organizational platform itself was the notion of black community. Its official stated aim was “to establish a brotherhood among the black race, to promote a spirit of race pride, to reclaim the fallen and to assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa…”
• The organization founded cooperative grocery stores, restaurants, laundries, garment factories, dress shops, a greeting card company, millinery, a phonograph record company, and a publishing house in New York
• Garvey believed heavily in a return (and re-development) to Africa, and black separatism, desiring that members of the African diaspora form their own institutions and societies

Quiz Question

Nicolás Guillén

• Guillén was born in 1902 in the city of Camaguey in Cuba
• Guillén was one of Cuba's most popular poets of the 20th century, and was one of the most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals of his era, winning the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954 and the Cuban Order of José Martí by Fidel Castro in 1954

• His poems were very politically outspoken about economic and larger inequality, and Guillén went to Spain to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War

• Due to his positions in politics, he was exiled from Cuba during Fulgencio Batista's regime in the 1950s and later served as a member of the Central Committe of the Cuban Communist Party
• Guillén incorporated a number of African song and dance rhythms into his literary works, publishing collections including Motivos de son (1930), Sónogro cosongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1934), El son entero (1947), his several Elegías (1948-58), and La Paloma de vuelo popular (1958)

BALLAD OF MY TWO GRANDFATHERS (Excerpt):Shadows that only I can see My two grandfathers go with me. Lance with head of bone, drum of leather and of wood my black grandfather. Ruff round his broad throat, grey warrior’s armour; my white grandfather.

Quiz Question

W. E. B. Du Bois

• Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, Du Bois was one of the most prominent black intellectual and protest leaders of the twentieth century (and was the first black recipient of a Ph.D. from Harvard University)
• In 1897, Du Bois founded the American Negro Academy with other black intellectuals, an organization that aimed to promote black scholarship.
• In 1903, he published one of his most famous works, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays largely influenced by his own experiences, which discusses education, exploitation, the black church, the concept of identity within the African American community, and many other connected topics
• Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. He was later appointed director of research and publications.
• In 1935, Du Bois published a history of the Reconstruction era, Black Reconstruction in America, which highlighted the agency of black Americans during the Reconstruction era, and combatted the common dismissal of the period in the mainstream historical discipline of the time

Quiz Question

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Trivia Questions

Question 2:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Question 1:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Question 3:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Question 4:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Question 5:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.

Question 6:

Show enthusiasm! Breathe deeply and say what you came to say.