The Emergence of Afro-American Cultures
The official estimates of the scope of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade suggest that between 500,000 and 600,000 Africans were imported into North America over the course of about 200 years, but even unofficial estimates that take into account the level of illegal smuggling of slaves into the British colonies from the Caribbean and through Louisiana (see the film Amistad for an idea of how this happened) would only raise the numbers by about 10% at best. The realization that the population of people of African descent in the United States, slaves and free me, had risen to over 3,500,000 people by the time of the Civil War means that within a relatively short time the cultural identity of slaves had become uniquely American. Over the course of the past fifty years, this challenge had led cultural historians and anthropologists to use terms like Africanisms (aspects of culture that can be traced to similar expressions in various parts of Africa), Creolization (cultural adaptations, especially in language, that represent blends of European and African elements), Syncretism (cultural practices that result from combining African and European elements, especially with regard to religion and spirituality into new expression), and more recently, Ethnogenesis (the idea that people from different places give birth to new forms of cultural expression, especially through the processes of identity formation.) Write short answers, [3-5 sentences] for each of the questions below. Each answer is worth 25 points toward a maximum score of 125 points. A well-written short answer should identify significant themes addressed in each lesson.
1. What kinds of African musical techniques are preserved in Afro-American music?
2. What types of instruments did enslaved Afro-Americans use to make music in the eighteenth-century?
3. How did African languages influence the development vocabulary and dialects of Afro-American English?
4. Why did Arturo Schomburg insist that the study of cooking and food preparation was an important aspect of Afro-American cultural history?
5. How did “John and Old Master” folktales use humor to to remember the experience of slavery in African American communities in the South?
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