Afro-american Culture
From Metapedia
Afro-American Culture refers to the culture of the African-Americans, the descendants of Negro slaves imported into America from the 1600s until the 1800s when the slave trade was outlawed.
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[edit] Religion
While African Americans practice a number of religions, Protestant Christianity is by far the most popular. Additionally, 14% of Muslims in the United States and Canada are African American.
The religious institutions of African American Christians commonly are referred to collectively as the black church. During slavery, many slaves were stripped of their African belief systems and typically denied free religious practice. Slaves managed, however, to hang on to some practices by integrating them into Christian worship in secret meetings. These practices, including dance, shouts, African rhythms, and enthusiastic singing, remain a large part of worship in the African American church. African American churches taught that all people were equal in God's eyes and viewed the doctrine of obedience to one's master taught in white churches as hypocritical. Instead the African American church focused on the message of equality and hopes for a better future. Before and after emancipation, racial segregation in America prompted the development of organized African American denominations. The first of these was the AME Church founded by Richard Allen in 1787. An African American church is not necessarily a separate denomination. Several predominantly African American churches exist as members of predominantly white denominations. African American churches have served to provide African American people with leadership positions and opportunities to organize that were denied in mainstream American society. Because of this, African American pastors became the bridge between the African American and European American communities and thus played a crucial role in the American Civil Rights Movement.
Like many Christians, African American Christians sometimes participate in or attend a Christmas play. Black Nativity by Langston Hughes is a re-telling of the classic Nativity story with gospel music. Productions can be found a African American theaters and churches all over the country.
- Also see Black Muslims
Generations before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade, Islam was a thriving religion in West Africa due to its peaceful introduction via the lucrative trans-Saharan trade between prominent tribes in the southern Sahara and the Berbers to the North. In his attesting to this fact the West African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop explained: "The primary reason for the success of Islam in Black Africa...consequently stems from the fact that it was propagated peacefully at first by solitary Arabo-Berber travelers to certain Black kings and notables, who then spread it about them to those under their jurisdiction". Many first-generation slaves were often able to retain their Muslim identity, their descendants were not. Slaves were either forcibly converted to Christianity as was the case in the Catholic lands or were besieged with gross inconviences to their religious practice such as in the case of the Protestant American mainland. In the decades after slavery and particularly during the depression era, Islam reemerged in the form of highly visible and sometimes controversial heterodox movements in the African American community. The first of these of note was the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali. Ali had a profound influence on Wallace Fard Muhammad, who later founded the Black nationalist Nation of Islam in 1930. Elijah Muhammad became head of the organization in 1934. Much like Malcolm X, who left the Nation of Islam in 1964, many African American Muslims now follow traditional Islam. A survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows that 30% of Sunni Mosque attendees are African Americans. African American orthodox Muslims are often the victims of stereotypes, most notably the assumption that an African American Muslim is a member of the Nation of Islam. They are often viewed by the uneducated African-American community in general as less authentic than Muslims from the Middle East or South Asia while credibility is less of an issue with immigrant Muslims and Muslim world in general.
Aside from Christianity and Islam, there are also African Americans who follow Judaism, Buddhism, and a number of other religions. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a collection of African American Jewish religious organizations. Among their varied teachings, they often include that African Americans are descended from the Biblical Hebrews (sometimes with the paradoxical claim that the Jewish people are not), such as Hulon Mitchell Jr. There is a small but growing number of African Americans who participate in African traditional religions, such as Vodou and Santeria or Ifa and diasporic traditions like Rastafarianism. Many of them are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean and South America, where these are practiced. Because of religious practices, such as animal sacrifice, which are no longer common among American religions and are often legally prohibited, these groups may be viewed negatively and are sometimes the victims of harassment.
[edit] Arts and Crafts
From its early origins in slave communities, through the end of the twentieth century, African-American art has made a vital contribution to the art of the United States.[24] During the period between the 1600s and the early 1800s, art took the form of small drums, quilts, wrought-iron figures and ceramic vessels in the southern United States. These artifacts have similarities with comparable crafts in West and Central Africa. In contrast, African American artisans like the New England–based engraver Scipio Moorhead and the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson created art that was conceived in a thoroughly western European fashion.
During the 1800s, Harriet Powers made quilts in rural Georgia, United States that are now considered among the finest examples of nineteenth-century Southern quilting.[26] Later in the 20th century, the women of Gee’s Bend developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional African American quilts with a geometric simplicity that developed separately but was like that of Amish quilts and modern art.
After the American Civil War, museums and galleries began more frequently to display the work of African American artists. Cultural expression in mainstream venues was still limited by the dominant European aesthetic and by racial prejudice. To increase the visibility of their work, many African American artists traveled to Europe where they had greater freedom. It was not until the Harlem Renaissance that more whites began to pay attention to African American art in America.
During the 1920s, artists such as Raymond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, and photographer James Van Der Zee became well-known for their work. During the Great Depression, new opportunities arose for these and other African American artists under the WPA. In later years, other programs and institutions, such as the New York City-based Harmon Foundation, helped to foster African American artistic talent. Augusta Savage, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and others exhibited in museums and juried art shows, and built reputations and followings for themselves.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there were very few widely accepted African American artists. Despite this, The Highwaymen, a loose association of 27 African American artists from Ft. Pierce, Florida, created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida landscape and peddled some 50,000 of them from the trunks of their cars. They sold their art directly to the public rather than through galleries and art agents, thus receiving the name "The Highwaymen". Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as an important part of American folk history. Their artwork is widely collected by enthusiasts and original pieces can easily fetch thousands of dollars in auctions and sales.
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was another period of resurgent interest in African American art. During this period, several African-American artists gained national prominence, among them Lou Stovall, Ed Love, Charles White, and Jeff Donaldson. Donaldson and a group of African-American artists formed the Afrocentric collective AFRICOBRA, which remains in existence today. The sculptor Martin Puryear, whose work has been acclaimed for years, is being honored with a 30-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York starting November 2007.
[edit] Cuisine
Under slavery, African Americans were unable to eat better cuts of meat, and after emancipation many often were too poor to afford them. Soul food, a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South (but also common to African Americans nationwide), makes creative use of inexpensive products procured through farming and subsistence hunting and fishing. Pig intestines are boiled and sometimes battered and fried to make chitterlings, also known as "chitlins." Ham hocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups, beans and boiled greens (turnip greens, collard greens, and mustard greens). Other common foods, such as fried chicken and fish, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and hoppin' john (black-eyed peas and rice) are prepared simply. When the African American population was considerably more rural than it generally is today, rabbit, possum, squirrel, and waterfowl were important additions to the diet. Many of these food traditions are especially predominant in many parts of the rural South.
Traditionally prepared soul food is often high in fat, sodium and starch. Highly suited to the physically demanding lives of laborers, farmhands and rural lifestyles generally, it is now a contributing factor to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in a population that has become increasingly more urban and sedentary. As a result, more health-conscious African-Americans are using alternative methods of preparation, eschewing trans fats in favor of natural vegetable oils and substituting smoked turkey for fatback and other, cured pork products; limiting the amount of refined sugar in desserts; and emphasizing the consumption of more fruits and vegetables than animal protein. There is some resistance to such changes, however, as they involve deviating from long culinary tradition.
[edit] See Also
- Magical Negro
- Dixieland
- Fried chicken
- Afro-american sports
- Nigger
- Wiggers
- Hip Hop
- Jazz
- Rap
- Gangstas
- Black crime
[edit] External links
