African American Music has always served to document the history of enslaved Africans in America. It takes its roots in African Spirituality and originally pervades all aspects of African life. That Music has been transformed as soon as it got on this side of the Atlantic Ocean in a context of slavery and oppression. As historical documents, African American Music has served African Americans to deal with their experience in America from slavery to freedom. This work studies how Black Spirituals and the Blues have played a tremendous role in building an African American identity and in raising race consciousness in an oppressed people in a perpetual quest for freedom and equal rights in America. / African American Studies

Scientific Racism was a method used by some to legitimize racist social thought without any compelling scientific evidence. This study seeks to identify, through the Afrocentric Paradigm, some of these studies and how they have influenced the modern western institution of medicine. It is also the aim of this research to examine the ways Africans were exploited by the western institution of medicine to progress the field. Drawing on The Post Traumatic Slave Theory, I will examine how modern-day Africans in America are affected by the experiences of enslaved Africans. / African American Studies

As part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the United States has held an annual Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, encouraging nationals of countries that historically sent few migrants to the United States to apply for one of 50,000 legal immigrant visas. The DV lottery has reshaped global migration, making possible for the first time significant voluntary immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States, and serving U.S. public diplomacy in the region by sustaining the American Dream. Drawing on a range of archival and published sources and oral interviews conducted in Africa, this dissertation illuminates how immigration and American global power have shaped each other since the end of the Cold War. It traces the history of the lottery from its legislation in Washington to its operation in sub-Saharan Africa, where, transmitted by non-state actors, it shaped African perceptions of the United States. Sparked by the advocacy of undocumented Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1980s, policymakers created the lottery as an instrument for legal migration outside of family, employment, and refugee admissions categories. Motivated by domestic politics, and aiming to make visas available to white Europeans shut out of the system since 1965’s Hart-Cellar Act, Congress embraced “diversity” to attract immigrants from countries underrepresented in the immigration stream. Once enacted, immigration attorneys and others amplified the program for personal profit, attracting eager applicants both within and outside of U.S. borders. The lottery was the subject of the world’s first internet spam in 1994, and its operation coincided with the global spread of internet cafés, which became, by the early 2000s, key sites of DV lottery participation and migration commercialization in Africa. The lottery provided a rare chance at geographic mobility for Africans after the end of the Cold War, making it powerful in the countries examined in this dissertation: Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. As neoliberal reforms reconfigured many African states’ economies in the 1980s and 1990s, individuals sought increasingly to escape in search of greener pastures. Unlike other contemporary migration policies, the lottery unintentionally created a channel of legal access to the United States for Africans. Local entrepreneurs seized the visa lottery as an opportunity to profit from fellow Africans’ desperation and aspiration to depart. They transformed the abstract policy into a concrete possibility and promoted positive impressions of the United States as a land of “milk and honey,” reshaping African migrations and international relations in the process. / History

The anti-colonial struggles in lusophone Africa were the most internationalized wars on the continent. Involved were people from across the globe and across the socioeconomic and political spectrums - Chinese Communists and Portuguese right-wing dictators, American black nationalists in the urban North and South African white supremacists, cold warriors and human rights activists. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), was the only national liberation movement in the 1960s to receive aid from the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. I contend that, because both FRELIMO and Portugal relied on support from the international community to wage war for over a decade (1964-1975), the anti-colonial wars in lusophone Africa were not only armed struggles, but also cultural and rhetorical battles. FRELIMO's program of socialist revolution which heralded human rights and social justice through education, non- racialism and gender equality resonated with the international shift to the left of the 1960s. Counterpoised were the Portuguese right-wing corporative dictatorship which espoused a "Lusotropical" civilizing mission for its African overseas provinces, and the white supremacist regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa that militarily and economically dominated Southern Africa. This dissertation focuses particularly on the relationship between FRELIMO and the activists of the black freedom struggle and the New Left in the United States. It will show the significant contributions that American activists made to Mozambican liberation, as well as the impact that this transnational movement had on the entire Southern African region, on U.S. foreign policy, and on the United States' domestic social and political landscapes. I explore issues of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity within a cold war context using the lenses of race, class, and culture in the United States and southern Africa during the long Sixties. I also examine the significance of religious organizations and the moral imperative that underpinned the global advocacy supporting southern African independence. The development of a transnational network of activists that reached from rural Africa to the White House provided the leverage needed for southern Africans and their international allies to topple the Portuguese dictatorship and, eventually, end South African apartheid. / History

This research aims to reinforce the functional aspect of the Afrocentric paradigm by coupling the development of Afrocentric consciousness with a systemic race consciousness so that the intellectual production coming out of the discipline of Africology can more practically address the needs of Afrikan people under the contemporary system of white supremacy. By examining strengths and limitations of some existing theories and concepts within Black Studies, the goal of this examination becomes to more effectively address the problems of the epistemic convergence Eurocentrism structurally imposes on Afrikan people seeking liberation. Through an examination of how the cultural logic of racism/white supremacy has determined the shape and character of institutions within the United States, this work will argue that the most constructive political disposition for an Afrocentrist to take is one of separatist nationalism. The argument being made is that this ideological component is a necessary catalyst to produce Afrocentric scholarship that has optimal functional utility toward the goal of achieving sustainable liberation for Afrikan people from the Maafa. / African American Studies

This dissertation examines President Barack Obama as a symbol and his rhetoric through an Afrocentric analytical lens. The problem that prompted my research was the current process (and future probability) of President Barack Obama's image and legacy being drastically revised from the current perceptions held by most who observe him daily. In this study, the researcher utilized an empirical, symbolic, and rhetorical approach to conduct an Afrocentric data analysis. This process included a review of the foundational terms and concepts utilized to express the Afrocentric idea (including Afrocentricity, location, and agency), and ultimately led to new concepts, analytical tools, and theories based on the evidence manifested over the course this study. This text represents an attempt to seize the magnitude of the "Democratic day" that Barack Obama was elected in a way that it could strengthen understanding of the Afrocentric idea. Based upon the analytical foundation of Afrocentricity I presented a methodology described as Beneficial Extraction method that will highlight the information, examples, strategies and attributes that can be utilized, salvaged and implemented for the uplift of African people. My findings include, the need for an increase in the appreciation for incremental progress in the African/African American community and the need to refine the ability to recognize and benefit from multiple and diverse methods of struggle throughout the African Diaspora. / African American Studies

The primary aim of this dissertation is to examine the origins and nature of Somali nationalism. Studies on the subject are limited in terms of volume and scope of reach. Virtually all the current studies on Somali nationalism have approached the subject from an ethnicist/organic perspective, and, as such, treat Somali nationalism as an ethno-cultural movement. This dissertation seeks (a) to test the validity of the ethnicist/organic hypothesis; and (b) to expand the purview of the study on the subject In the first case, the aim is to see whether or not Somali nationalism was inspired by the ethno-cultural characteristics of the nation. Contrary to the findings of the previous studies, this research found out that such objective characteristics as race, religion, language, history, etc. had little or no effect on the development of Somali nationalism. True these issues were sometimes raised by Somali leaders during the nationalist struggle, but they were expressed as political grievances against the colonial administrations rather than as sources of nationalist inspirations In the second, this dissertation seeks to expand the scope of the study on Somali nationalism and also to contribute to the literature on the subject. To this end, it offers a rival hypothesis to the ethnicist/organic explanations of the past, namely anti-colonial nationalism. Accordingly, it focuses on the character of the colonial administrations as the primary causes of Somali nationalism rather than on the natural qualities of the Somali nation. By doing so, this dissertation places the study of Somali nationalism in its proper regional, historical, and socio-political context / acase@tulane.edu

The idea of exploring the topic of the thesis has been promoted by the revival of Islam as a legal system in a number of Islamic nation states, as an assertion and part of their identity. This development is regarded by some as adversely affecting non-Muslim citizens in such states when looked at in the light of international principles. / Sudan, a multireligious state, declared the application of Sharia laws in 1983. The thesis addresses the impact of the application of Sharia law on non-Muslims within the historical, political and legal context of Sudan. This is examined in the light of international principles. / To this end, the thesis uses a comparative methodology, entailing the identification of the areas of inconsistencies between rules of Sharia governing non-Muslim subjects and international norms. Thus, an examination of Sudanese laws based on Sharia having an impact on non-Muslims is made.

This thesis examines the lives of Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his eldest son, Peter Mbiyu Koinange. It joins with the growing rise of biographical work within African Studies. It challenges the historical understanding of late colonial rule in Kenya and the role of official myth in pre- and post-independence historical narratives. Koinange wa Mbiyu was the patriarch of one of the most respected, wealthy, and politically influential Kikuyu families of Kenya's colonial and post-colonial period. His eldest son, Peter Mbiyu, received a prestigious education abroad and returned to Kenya where he became a prominent leader for African independent education African political action. Koinange and Peter bear frequent mention in academic discussions of collaboration, discontent, nationalism, and militancy in Kenya's colonial era. This thesis challenges the widely held narrative that Koinange and Peter embraced militant politics opposing colonial rule during the 1940s. While fitting larger understandings of decolonisation, it is not an honest depiction of the Koinange's political actions. As a result, this thesis is intentionally a work of revisionist history that looks to the profound changes in the culture and nature of colinal rule during the 1940s, rather than a political shift in the Koinanges. In addition to challenging the prevalent understanding of Koinange and Peter's political action, this thesis raises a number of areas - gender, wealth, elite and family dynamics, to name a few - where the Koinange family history would further illuminate the historical understanding of the colonial era. This thesis is a dual biography, crafted as a work of narrative history. It challenges a breadth of current scholarship, utilizing the largest collection of pre-Mau Mau archival records to date. This thesis engages with a number of historiographical challenges related to biography, the individual, the family, and the challenges of oral history shaped in the crucible of cultural crisis.

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