African American Cultural History and Development: Analysis of South to America by Imani Perry and Colour Purple by Alice Walker
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
African-American culture refers to the contributions of African Americans to the culture of the United States, either as part of or distinct from mainstream American culture. The distinct identity of African-American culture is rooted in the historical experience of the African-American people, including the Middle Passage. The culture is both distinct and enormously influential on American and global worldwide culture as a whole.
African-American culture is rooted in the blend between the native African cultures of West Africa and Central Africa and the European culture that has influenced and modified its development in the American South. Understanding its identity within the culture of the United States, that is, in the anthropological sense, conscious of its origins as largely a blend of West and Central African cultures. Although slavery greatly restricted the ability for Africans to practice their original cultural traditions, many practices, values and beliefs survived, and over time have modified and/or blended with European cultures and other cultures such as that of Native Americans. African-American identity was established during the period of slavery, producing a dynamic culture that has had and continues to have a profound impact on American culture as a whole, as well as that of the broader world.
Elaborate rituals and ceremonies were a significant part of African-Americans’ ancestral culture. Many West African societies traditionally believed that spirits dwelled in their surrounding nature. From this disposition, they treated their environment with mindful care. They also generally believed that a spiritual life source existed after death and that ancestors in this spiritual realm could then mediate between the supreme Creator and the living. Honor and prayer were displayed to these “ancient ones”, the spirit of that past. West Africans also believed in spiritual possession.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Christianity began to spread across North Africa; this shift in religion began displacing traditional spiritual practices from Africa. The enslaved Africans brought this complex religious dynamic within their culture to America. This fusion of traditional beliefs from Africa with Christianity provided a commonplace for those practicing religion in Africa and America.
After emancipation, unique African-American traditions have continued to flourish, as distinctive traditions or radical innovations in music, art, literature, religion, cuisine, and other fields. 20th-century sociologists, such as Gunnar Myrdal, believed that African-Americans had lost most of their cultural ties with Africa. But, anthropological field research by Melville Herskovits and others demonstrated that there has been a continuum of African traditions among Africans of the diaspora. The greatest influence of African cultural practices on European culture is found below the Mason-Dixon line in the American South.
African American Cultural History and Development: Analysis of South to America by Imani Perry and Colour Purple by Alice Walker
For many years African-American culture developed separately from American culture, both because of slavery and the persistence of racial discrimination in America, as well as African-American slave descendants’ desire to create and maintain their own traditions. Today, African-American culture has influenced American culture and yet still remains a distinct cultural body. African-American culture is influenced by the culture of the Southern United States. Their food and language is influenced by White Southerners who enslaved them on plantations in the South.
People of African descent in America today are called African Americans. Over time and at different times in history, they had been called Negroes, coloured, blacks and Afro-Americans. Because of the negative connotations of the words in American history, Negroes and coloured/colored have become rare in usage in recent times. Black and, especially, African American, are more favourable terms.
The politics and tension of even the proper name to call this race to speak volumes on how they got to America in the first place and what their life experiences have been. The slave trade and slavery of the 17th to 18th centuries are responsible for the presence of most African Americans in the space called the United States of America today. They were mostly required to work in the plantations (rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco); thus slave labour took a very long time to be erased and was done in stages with different parts of America emancipating their slaves at different times. Abolition faced stiff opposition in some states of America with the Southern states being the last to let go because of the economic relevance of the slaves, especially as the crops like cotton have become export crops.
With the abolition of the slave trade by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution on December 18, 1865, slavery ended in the United States only in name (Weider History Group, 2013; America‘s Historical Documents, 2013). The blacks were still under the same kind of demeaning treatment from their white counterparts; only this time it has found other names: racial discrimination, denial of human rights, and the black population were still employed to do mean jobs since industrialization was still rising.
Of course, human beings do not naturally keep quiet when maltreated. Therefore, it is only expected that the slave trade, slavery and the accompanying ill-treatment raised different reactions from both the black and white quarters, but more from the black side of the divide. Abolitionists went to work with their protests, campaigns, writings, etc. and gradually erased slavery. Other movements would also rise among the African Americans to champion the cause of the marginalized blacks: Movements that fought against the Jim Crow laws that promoted racial discrimination – Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the early 1900s, the Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) which brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Black Power Movement which encouraged African Americans to look to their African/Black roots for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity.
In the history of African American literary tradition, there are two opposing cultural theories regarding the problem being confronted. One theory is “integrationist’’ and argues that the Black man must strive to integrate into the American experience. It chooses priority of American values over the black ones. The other theory considers integration impossible because America is not a homogeneous country to integrate into. Thus they speak in favour of group solidarity, ethnic independence and the “negritude “Historically, the African –American writer has always oscillated between these two aesthetic theories. It is on this background that the work seeks to examine African American Cultural History and Development in Imani Perry’s South to America and Alice Walker’s Colour Purple
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Over the years, African Americans who fled from the South soon found that they had not escaped segregation and discrimination. They were confined mainly to overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and they were largely restricted to poorly paid menial jobs. Again there were anti-Black riots, such as that in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. But in the Northern cities, the economic and educational opportunities for African Americans were immeasurably greater than they had been in the rural South. In addition, they were helped by various organizations, such as the National Urban League, founded in 1910. Some African Americans opposed involvement in World War I. The Black Socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen argued that the fight for democracy at home should precede the fight for it abroad.
But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, most African Americans supported the step. During the war, about 1,400 Black officers were commissioned. Some 200,000 African Americans served abroad, though most were restricted to labour battalions and service regiments. It is on this note that the work seeks to examine African American Cultural History and Development: Analysis of South to America by Imani Perry and Colour Purple by Alice Walker.
1.3 Objective of the Study
The purpose of this research work will be to investigate the African American Cultural History and Development in Imani Perry’s South to America and Alice Walker’s Colour Purple