From all cultures of people arises a worldview that is utilized in preserving societal order and cultural cohesiveness. When such worldview is distorted by a calamity such as enslavement, the victims of that calamity are left marginal within the worldview of the oppressive power. From the European Enslavement of Africans, or to use Marimba Ani’s term, the Maafa, arose the notion of European or White Supremacy. Such a notion, though emphatically false, has left many Africans in the Americas in a psychological state colloquially termed as “mental slavery”. The culprit that produced this oppressive condition is Eurocentricity and its utilization of the social theory white supremacy, which has maturated from theory into a paradigm for systemic racism. Often among African Americans there exists a profound sense of dislocation with fragmentary ideas of the correct path towards liberation and relocation. This has engendered the need for a paradigm to be utilized in relocating Africans back to their cultural center. To be sure, many Africans on the continent have not themselves sought value in returning to African ways of knowing. This is however also a product of white supremacy as European colonialism established such atmosphere on the African continent. Colonization and enslavement have impacted major aspects of African cultural and social relations. Much of the motif and ethos of Africa remained within the landscape and language. However, the fact that the challenge of decolonization even for the continental African is still quite daunting only further highlights the struggles of the descendants of the enslaved living in the Americas. The removal from geographic location and the near-destruction of indigenous language levied a heavy breach in defense against total acculturation. Despite this, among the African Americans, African culture exists though languishes under the pressures of white supremacy. A primary reason for such deterioration is the fact that, because of the effects of self-knowledge distortion brought on by the era of enslavement, many African Americans do not realize the African paradigms from which phenomena in African American cultures derive. Furthermore, the lack of a nationalistic culture impedes the collective ability to hold such phenomena sacred and preserve it for the sake of posterity. Today, despite the extant African culture, African Americans largely operate from European paradigms, as America itself is a European or “Western” project. The need for a paradigm shift in African-American cultural dynamics has been the call of many, however is perhaps best illuminated by Dr. Maulana Karenga when he states that we have a “popular culture” and not a nationalistic one. Black nationalism has been presented to Black People for over a century however it has varied greatly between different ideological camps. The variation and many conflictions of these different ideologies perhaps helped the stagnation of the Black Nationalist movement itself. An Afrocentric investigation into African paradigms and the Black Nationalist movements should yield results beneficial to African people living in the Americas. / African American Studies

This project examines how the oppression of African Americans, especially those in domestic service to white families, is reflected in literature. The two works The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird will be the main sources. I investigate issues of race and skin colour, as well as the depiction of the ‘black’ and‘ white’ races in America in literature. Yet I will also make use of writers on African American issues to evaluate the writings on the main works concerned. What I will try to establish is whether the two authors (Kathryn Stockett and Harper Lee) effectively give a voice to the less empowered African-American segment of US society (this question of empowerment will be addressed below). And most importantly, I attempt to understand how two white women from relatively privileged backgrounds can reach across the supposed racial divide and, through aesthetic expression. I contend that peaceful protest and the mobilization of the arts in all its forms raised awareness of the terrible wrongs suffered by African Americans in the timeframe concerned in this work – anawareness raised not just in the USA but also around the world - and led to a new situation in which discrimination is not only illegal, but also widely acknowledged as deeply wrong.

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This dissertation presents a comprehensive business and social history of cinema-going in urban Gold Coast/Ghana from 1914 to 1982, the local beginning and end points of mass participation in that form of leisure. Local business owners invested capital and energy to create an audience for a new leisure form, and they built the sector from a single screen in 1914 to more than seventy cinemas by the early 1960s. Entrepreneurs confronted state regulators, whether colonial or post-colonial, who viewed the cinema as a negative force to be managed - but never embraced. Officials feared that the emergence of a popular leisure form could challenge their efforts to impose particular models of behavior. Successive governments characterized the cinema as a potential source of criminal inspiration. Officials treated expatriate entrepreneurs of the post-war period with equal disdain, profiting from their business know-how but rejecting them when expedient. As the gatekeeper for foreign films, most of which came from the US, the state had a position of considerable legal power. Governments regulated imports, developed censorship policies, and policed screenings. They could not, however, restrain the popular imagination. Ghanaians embraced the cinema from its inception, seeing in it a cheap leisure outlet in urban areas that were reorienting social and familial lives, as well as a means for reflection on their modern selves. Where officials feared imagery of luxury, adventure and romance on the big screen, Ghanaians saw the opportunity for comparison and analysis in addition to rich entertainment. Ghanaian audiences created their own cinema-going culture. They thrived on constant rotation of new films and old favorites to the point of forcing compromise on an American industry eager to impose its own business model in the early 1960s. Ghana's status in the vanguard of African independence prompted internal and external observers to analyze local cinema-going culture to understand and to control the audience in the cheap seats. However, the urban audience fought against this impulse, seeing in the cinema space a place to configure new relationships and to give voice to a joyous engagement with a vibrant, ever-changing art form.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

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The dissertation is a primarily statistical investigation of the demographic dimensions of the slave population of northern Virginia from 1750 until 1860, and the resulting opportunity for formation of slave families and development of slave culture. It attempts to determine the continuity of slave families in the nineteenth century, and to assess the effect of family breakup caused by bequest or sale to traders involved in the interstate slave trade. It determines that favorable conditions existed for development of slave families and culture, which persisted into the nineteenth century in spite of significant family disruption due to sale and bequest.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 33-06, Section: A, page: 2900. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1972.