Pub Date : 2018-08-21DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2018.1512392
Mauro J. Caraccioli
1. Also, consistent with the structural-functionalists’ intent to contribute to the project of Indirect Rule, Apter ‘discovers’ a primordial Yoruba political system in which authorities are conveniently divided among ‘royalty,’ ‘civil chiefs,’ ‘military chiefs,’ and priests. Apter is not sufficiently suspicious that his own discourse, and the British imperial logic from which he and the colonies inherited it, are part of the cultural ‘“there” there’ that he presumes to have excavated from the pristine past.
{"title":"Anywhere but here: black intellectuals in the Atlantic world and beyond / Black intellectual thought in modern America: a historical perspective","authors":"Mauro J. Caraccioli","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2018.1512392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2018.1512392","url":null,"abstract":"1. Also, consistent with the structural-functionalists’ intent to contribute to the project of Indirect Rule, Apter ‘discovers’ a primordial Yoruba political system in which authorities are conveniently divided among ‘royalty,’ ‘civil chiefs,’ ‘military chiefs,’ and priests. Apter is not sufficiently suspicious that his own discourse, and the British imperial logic from which he and the colonies inherited it, are part of the cultural ‘“there” there’ that he presumes to have excavated from the pristine past.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"12 1","pages":"113 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2018.1512392","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43782356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-08-06DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2018.1504373
J. Matory
{"title":"Oduduwa’s chain: locations of culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic","authors":"J. Matory","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2018.1504373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2018.1504373","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"12 1","pages":"109 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2018.1504373","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42220020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-29DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2018.1480088
David Ratner
ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, descriptions of a new topic began to appear in Israeli media as well as in academic writing, of Israeli-Ethiopian youngsters who identified with black music in general and rap/hip-hop in particular. In this paper, I challenge previous interpretations for this phenomenon, arguing that they were insufficiently based on meanings that the youngsters themselves attach to their musical preferences. The study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 young Israeli-Ethiopian men. The interviews were focused on meanings young Israeli-Ethiopians attach to rap music, which is their favorite musical style. The study shows that the pivotal experience which associates them with black music and is central to their identity in general is their constant visibility through the white-Israeli people’s gaze. This visibility, reflected in constant reminders by the ‘white’ Israeli society of the Ethiopian adolescents being ‘black’, makes the adolescents fascinated by black music and rap music in particular, which they perceive to be offering them a resonance of their experiences, comfort, and empowerment. Black music in general, and rap music in particular, resonates with the lived experiences of Black Ethiopian Israelis and it serves as a symbolic bridge through which the youngsters connect to the historical narratives of the African trans-Atlantic diaspora, and draw inspiration from them.
{"title":"Rap, racism, and visibility: black music as a mediator of young Israeli-Ethiopians’ experience of being ‘Black’ in a ‘White’ society","authors":"David Ratner","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2018.1480088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2018.1480088","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, descriptions of a new topic began to appear in Israeli media as well as in academic writing, of Israeli-Ethiopian youngsters who identified with black music in general and rap/hip-hop in particular. In this paper, I challenge previous interpretations for this phenomenon, arguing that they were insufficiently based on meanings that the youngsters themselves attach to their musical preferences. The study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 40 young Israeli-Ethiopian men. The interviews were focused on meanings young Israeli-Ethiopians attach to rap music, which is their favorite musical style. The study shows that the pivotal experience which associates them with black music and is central to their identity in general is their constant visibility through the white-Israeli people’s gaze. This visibility, reflected in constant reminders by the ‘white’ Israeli society of the Ethiopian adolescents being ‘black’, makes the adolescents fascinated by black music and rap music in particular, which they perceive to be offering them a resonance of their experiences, comfort, and empowerment. Black music in general, and rap music in particular, resonates with the lived experiences of Black Ethiopian Israelis and it serves as a symbolic bridge through which the youngsters connect to the historical narratives of the African trans-Atlantic diaspora, and draw inspiration from them.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"12 1","pages":"108 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2018.1480088","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48966194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394614
John L. Jackson
Blastmaster KRS-One first piqued my interest in Africana Hebrewisms. The boom-bap, boom-bap, boom-bap of drum machines’ staccato incantations served as an acoustic backdrop for his poetic formulati...
{"title":"Clearing tables, dancefloors, and record stacks: an afterword","authors":"John L. Jackson","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2017.1394614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394614","url":null,"abstract":"Blastmaster KRS-One first piqued my interest in Africana Hebrewisms. The boom-bap, boom-bap, boom-bap of drum machines’ staccato incantations served as an acoustic backdrop for his poetic formulati...","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"11 1","pages":"221 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394614","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45668066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394639
F. Markowitz
This special issue of African and Black Diaspora derives from an intense, on-going conversation among an international cadre of interdisciplinary scholars whose combined theoretical interests and fieldwork experiences are making important contributions to Diaspora Studies. It began early in 2015 as Nir Avieli, Gabriella Djerrahian, Steven Kaplan, Hilla Paz, and I submitted abstracts for a session entitled, ‘Tastes and Tunes of Black Israeli(te)s’ to the program committee for the 8th Biennial ASWAD [Association for the Study of the African Diaspora] Conference. Our session earned a place on the program, and we presented our papers at the conference in Charleston, South Carolina in November of that year. Immediately thereafter we asked Uri Dorchin, Sarah Hankins, John L. Jackson, Jr., Magdel LeRoux, and Hagar Salamon to join in our discussion. Heeding Paul Gilroy’s call to assert the importance of ‘exchanges between blacks and Jews for the future of black Atlantic cultural politics as well as for its history’ (1993, xi), this collection of essays grapples with those historical conjunctures and overlapping diasporic streams regarding people(s) of African heritage who also avow and enact connections to Israel and to Judaism. With a specific focus on food and music, the issue’s eight articles explore and explicate the dynamic cultural practices of Black groups ranging from the Lemba of South Africa to Ethiopian Jewish Israelis, and from Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to the Chicago-born African Hebrew Israelite Community, that articulate claims for Jewish recognition and inclusion, if not rights of residence and refuge in Israel. Despite the transgressive inroads made by diasporic thought and postmodern theories by cutting across disciplinary boundaries and challenging long-standing cultural categories, more than 15 years have passed since Katya Gibel Azoulay, (2001) observed that in the United States only scant attention is paid to ‘the multiply inscribed subject produced by the diasporic condition shared by those of Jewish and African descent’ (211). In contrast, Black–Jewish relations have captured considerable popular and scholarly interest, including heady and heartfelt discussions by public intellectuals about conflicts between Blacks and Jews and strategies for mending those rifts (Lerner and West 1995, 1996), as well as more standard academic research into, for example, Blacks’ and Jews’ literary images of each other (Budick 1998; Goffman 2000; Rottenberg 2014), analyses of everyday intergroup encounters in American cities (Goldschmidt 2006; Lee 2002; Shapiro 2006), and comparative (political) histories of Blacks’ and Jews’ respective experiences (Adams and Bracey 1999; Berman 1994; Diner 1995; Salzman and West 1997; Schorsch 2004; Sundquist 2005). Several of these studies highlight borrowings, unequal exchanges, or appropriations between the two groups, especially regarding religion (Baer and Singer 1992;
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394602
Gabriella Djerrahian
ABSTRACT The ‘return’ of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last three decades provides an alternative case. In this presentation, I focus on the prominent role of music as ethno-racial information for Ethiopian Israelis as they engage with the process of homing and integrating in Israel. I explore their experience as black Jews through the musical tastes of young Ethiopian Israelis. For these youths, far from leaving their Ethiopianness behind, music is the fodder for actively reinventing it. I explore how they claim their place as Jews in Israel through participation in the musical communities of Ethiopian and African diasporas.
{"title":"The ‘end of diaspora’ is just the beginning: music at the crossroads of Jewish, African, and Ethiopian diasporas in Israel","authors":"Gabriella Djerrahian","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2017.1394602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394602","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The ‘return’ of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last three decades provides an alternative case. In this presentation, I focus on the prominent role of music as ethno-racial information for Ethiopian Israelis as they engage with the process of homing and integrating in Israel. I explore their experience as black Jews through the musical tastes of young Ethiopian Israelis. For these youths, far from leaving their Ethiopianness behind, music is the fodder for actively reinventing it. I explore how they claim their place as Jews in Israel through participation in the musical communities of Ethiopian and African diasporas.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"11 1","pages":"161 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394602","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48533458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394613
Sarah E. Hankins
ABSTRACT Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.
{"title":"‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual, black musics, and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder","authors":"Sarah E. Hankins","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2017.1394613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394613","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"11 1","pages":"190 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2017.1394613","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45570229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394611
Uri Dorchin
ABSTRACT During the second half of the 1990s, an extended number of illegal African labor migrants arrived at Israel. Whereas associational life among them was based almost exclusively on their national and tribal social clubs, the Afrovision nightclub was a unique grassroots initiative that crossed these boundaries. Based on studies of festive rituals, and more specifically of the role of music and dance in processes of identity formation among migrants' communities, I show how and why Afrovision enabled African immigrants in Israel to come together and experience a sense of diasporic Africanism as a sort of shared identity beyond the salient sub-divisions within their community. Although this experience was partly a reaction to, or implementation of, common perceptions in Israeli society that view African people as of one fiber, the practical significance of the pan-Africanist option offered by Afrovision in the everyday lives of foreign residents far exceeded purely symbolic aspects.
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Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1397863
Hagar Salamon
ABSTRACT Meat is a key idiom in the lives of the Ethiopian Jews, both private and collective. This paper focuses on meat lottery as a unique praxis in Ethiopia and in the move of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) community, from Ethiopia to Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the egalitarian divide of meat to be consumed by all partners and its accompanied lottery ritual is described and analyzed, directing the gaze to its socio-cultural and symbolic meanings. Beyond the mitigating aspects of the lottery from a social perspective, i.e. circumventing potential rivalries in the distribution of the meat of a single animal among several partners, it is connected at heart with the notions of sacrifice and transformation.
{"title":"Meat lottery: a spectacle in transition from Ethiopia to Israel","authors":"Hagar Salamon","doi":"10.1080/17528631.2017.1397863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2017.1397863","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Meat is a key idiom in the lives of the Ethiopian Jews, both private and collective. This paper focuses on meat lottery as a unique praxis in Ethiopia and in the move of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) community, from Ethiopia to Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the egalitarian divide of meat to be consumed by all partners and its accompanied lottery ritual is described and analyzed, directing the gaze to its socio-cultural and symbolic meanings. Beyond the mitigating aspects of the lottery from a social perspective, i.e. circumventing potential rivalries in the distribution of the meat of a single animal among several partners, it is connected at heart with the notions of sacrifice and transformation.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"11 1","pages":"129 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17528631.2017.1397863","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44045759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2017.1394621
M. le Roux
ABSTRACT Most Lemba traditions and customs are transmitted by means of songs, chants, recitations, praises, proverbs, and prayers, in addition to written documents. Songs, recitations, and certain prayers could be described as poems or set speech; they form part of everyday language and are memorised. Others are sung, chanted, or prayed only on special occasions, such as the ritual slaughter of animals or during circumcision rites. The way the Lemba sing, eat, and pray expresses their unity and their conscious transferal and reinforcement of cultural and religious identity. It also reflects their understanding of their origin and the belief that their religious-cultural practices (embedded in an African culture) have been handed down to them from their Hebrew ancestors.
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