This perception is paralleled by the view of Africa itself, a continent brimming with potential but waylaid by war, poverty, disease, and insufficient investment in human capital. Blacks as a group are disproportionately associated with crime, poverty, disease, and educational underachievement. Even so, the contemporary contrast between the individual of distinction and the popular perception of blacks as a whole could not be more striking. Jazz, blues, reggae, and hip hop, for example, are global phenomena. They have contributed to the sciences and the arts in spectacular ways, but it is their cultural influence, involving literature, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, athletics, and religion, that has received greater recognition, with individual artists or athletes achieving extraordinary heights.

In ancient and medieval times their achievements were in instances unparalleled their economic contributions to the modern world have been extensive and foundational, introducing agricultural forms and mining techniques while providing the necessary labor. People of African descent, or black people, can be found in all walks of life. It is a story, or a collection of stories, like no other.Īs an undergraduate text, this book is written at a time of considerable perplexity, ambiguity, and seeming contradiction. Redistributions of European and Asian populations have also marked history, but the African Diaspora is unique in its formation. This phenomenon is referred to as the African Diaspora. It is a history of their experiences, contributions, victories, and struggles, and it is primarily concerned with massive movements and extensive relocations, over long periods of time, resulting in the dispersal of Africans and their descendants throughout much of the world. This book is about people of African descent who found (and find) themselves living either outside of the African continent or in parts of Africa that were territorially quite distant from their lands of birth.

To achieve the latter requires a willingness on the part of all to learn about the histories and cultures of everyone in the society. The United Kingdom and France in Europe, together with the United States and Brazil in the Americas, are perhaps only the better known of many such societies, a principal dynamic of which concerns how groups maintain their identities while forming new and viable communities with those who do not share their backgrounds or beliefs. The dawn of the twenty-first century finds persons of varying ethnic and racial and religious backgrounds living together in societies all over the globe.

0521806623 - Reversing Sail - A History of the African Diaspora - by Michael A.

Reversing Sail by Michael A. Gomez