A revisionist account of African masquerade carnivals in transnational
context that offers readers a unique perspective on the connecting
threads between African cultural trends and African American cultural
artifacts
In recent decades, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in
African-styled traditions and the influence of these traditions upon the
African diaspora. In this important new analysis, author Raphael Njoku
explores the transnational connections between masquerade narratives and
memory over the past four centuries to show how enslaved Africans became
culture carriers of inherited African traditions. In doing so, he
questions the scholarly predisposition toward ethnicization of African
cultural artifacts in the Americas. As Njoku's research shows, the
practices reenacted by the Igbo and Bight of Biafra modelers in the
Americas were not exact replicas of the African prototypes. Cultural
modeling is dynamic, and the inheritors of West African traditions often
adapted their customs to their circumstances--altering and transforming
the meaning and purpose of the customs they initially represented.
With the Bantu migrations serving as a catalyst for ethnic mixing and
change prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African-themed cultural
activities in the New World became dilutions of practices from several
ethnic African and European nations. African cultures were already
experiencing changes through Bantuization; in this well-researched and
engagingly written scholarly work, the author explores the extension of
this process beyond the African continent.
This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
