Week Four Flashcards
Cultural Nationalism
“Cultural nationalism” refers to the imagined community (nationalism) that is constructed through the privileging of a common culture among a certain group. That is, various cultural practices (e.g., language) as well as embodied social features (e.g., ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, etc.) are used to claim the existence of a specific nation. Cultural nationalism is most recognized in relatively recent history in the various “power” movements by Black, Chicana/o/x, Puerto Rican, and Native Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
A common critique of cultural nationalists is that they selectively pick and choose elements of their culture or community to present a homogeneous “unified” front, while downplaying/ignoring important differences. Also, while many cultural nationalists within US and other empires present themselves as underdogs challenging oppression, cultural nationalists can be just as hierarchical, capitalist, and imperialist as their present oppressors
AfroMestizaje
“AfroMestizaje” (aka “Mulataje”) relates to mixed-race people and cultures of African descent. While “mestizaje” generally refers to the mixture of Indigenous and European biology and culture amid Mestiza people, “Mulataje” and “AfroMestizaje” refer to the effaced Black roots of mestizaje. Mulataje is a controversial term due to its eugenicist etymology so “AfroMestizaje”–though redundant since there never was a mestizaje in the 16th century Americas without an African dimension–is now the preferred term.
Negritude
“Negritude” was a cultural arts and broader political movement beginning in the early 1900s in the Caribbean, and spread throughout Europe among Black intellectuals living, working, and studying there at the time. It sought to recover, feature, and celebrate the African roots of Black culture and subjectivity throughout the Black diaspora, in the Americas and elsewhere. It is predicated upon the development of robust art and culture that embraced African genealogies and aesthetics, rather than (imposed) white Eurocentric models of art, culture, and heritage. It later influenced the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in the US, and the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s.
Aimee Cesaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism” is one of the most famous/well-known publications from this movement, a text which heavily influenced later postcolonial thinkers like Franz Fanon and Edward Said.
The Black Arts Movement
“The Black Arts Movement” is heir to the Negritude and Harlem Renaissance arts movements, and added a more vernacular, particularly urban Black life, to the repertoire. This movement–contemporary with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States–involved an overtly oppositional and militant Black cultural nationalist politics throughout the 1960’s, which is evidenced in the titles of some poetry collections (e.g., Sonya Sanchez’s “Homegirls and Hand Grenades”), and provocative materialist poetry groups such as the Last Poets.
The Nuyorican Arts Movement
“The Nuyorican Arts Movement” grew out of the Puerto Rican cultural nationalist movement and anti-imperialist sentiments among expatriate Puerto Ricans living in the US (primarily in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City) in the late 1960s up to the present. The first wave of Nuyorican poets and artists were intertwined with the recovery of Puerto Rican Black heritage and underclass realities, which animated a cultural nationalist–and at times, revolutionary–Marxist anti-imperialist politics. While many Nuyoricans intersected with the Young Lords Party, the core originators were situated among the lumpen and involved a large segment of bisexual and gay artists and activists. A key figure in the original 1960s Nuyorican Poets Café—a landmark that exists today—is Miguel Piñero.
The Black Diaspora
“The Black diaspora” generally refers to the period during & immediately following the transatlantic slave trade (16th-late 19th century), in which African people were stolen from their homes and forced into bondage throughout Europe and the Americas. This is a tragic episode in world history that is of an epic scale, with the diaspora–and ripple effects of generational trauma/cultural & economic disenfranchisement–extending into the present day.
A key component of diaspora theory involves the argument that new homelands were formed in subsequent generations, which adds to the diasporic displacements. Simultaneously, the Black diaspora also refers to unique cultural syntheses throughout the world where African-descent people are located (such as jazz music & rock n’ roll in the US), while some also hold that there remain deep African roots to these cultures that form links between all Black diasporic communities (e.g., such as the concept of the Black Atlantic).
The Black Atlantic
“The Black Atlantic” is a term consolidated by scholar Paul Gilroy who argued that within the–otherwise very diverse–Black diasporic community throughout the Atlantic, profound commonalities and linkages persist. This claim is based on the African roots of many Black communities and cultures in various locations throughout the Atlantic area (that is, sites touched by the Middle Passage).
Critics claim that attempts to present a unitary model for diverse localities and regions within the Atlantic efface too many unique dimensions of culture/identity that have evolved over the past five centuries (such as the important differences between Black Americans whose multigenerational ancestors resided in the mainland US, vs those who are of Caribbean heritage). Nonetheless, this concept is an important touchstone for theorizing Black genealogies and new syntheses in various contact zones.
The Black Radical Tradition
“The Black Radical Tradition” is a concept attributed to former UCSB faculty Cedric Robinson, whose research uncovered incessant resistance activities—both theory and action—throughout the multi-century history of the Black Diaspora into the present. Critics contend that the term “radical” is too imprecise to signify a specific ideology, but others claim that this term deliberately seeks to encompass many different ideologies.
Al Ummah
“Al Ummah” is an ancient Arabic term that refers to the global community of Muslims (including many Muslims residing in Africa, and those of African descent). This alludes to a supra-national, supra-ethnic, supra-racial privileging of religion as the main category of identification for this community. Similar terms and concepts exist for various other Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, etc) and their offshoots.
Boricua
“Boricua” is the Taíno indigenous term for those currently referred to as “Puerto Ricans”. It is derived from the term Boriken, which is the indigenous name for the island. It is frequently used by cultural nationalists to signify an indigenous-based, anti-imperialist independence sentiment, particularly one that rejects the (current) US imperialist occupation of the island.
Ebonics/African American English
“Ebonics” is a term that has been supplanted by the more precise term “African American English” (aka “AAVE”). The term “ebonics” is seen as controversial by some–based as it is on the color “ebony.” Yet, it is still in use. Both terms refer to various vernacular Englishes among some (but certainly not all) African American individuals and communities. It should be noted that many vernacular Englishes exist across the English-speaking world, and within communities, and these include categories such as “Tex-Mex,” rural white “redneck” English, etc. The term “vernacular” simply denotes the fact that a given language style is in common/everyday use by a particular group of people.
Vernacular Englishes of all kinds include a wide range of unique features, which vary across time, place, and population. These include recovered Indigenous terms and concepts that are Anglicized into unique neologisms, various pronunciations that involve colloquial speech patterns, and more, though the grammar remains based on English.
