Afro

cases, the houses are single room buildings made out of cardboard, plastic and tin roofs held down by rocks. The more established favelas have houses of maybe 2 rooms and are made out of bricks rather than scavenged materials. Benedita da Silva, an Afro-Brazilian woman and politician who grew up in favelas showed that the favelas could overcome the horrible conditions that many of the slums could be improved through activism by the…

dissociate blacks with Africa. By embracing African contributions, Bahians put forth their own sense of racial identity. One such contribution that is intricately woven into the fabric of Bahian identity is the importance given to Candomble. Candomble is an Afro-Brazilian religion that was popular in Salvador. Candomble leaders worked to construct the images of legitimacy and respectability that academics helped publicize. In the face of religious repression and oppression, these black thinkers…

The world is filled with oppression. It’s in many forms and may not be completely visible. It hides, waiting to strike at the correct moment, making sure to pierce through the weakness parts. One type of it by pushing people within a box. Labels and names are put onto other people, and when people try to leave the box of conformity, they are treated like a traitor. People hate the change, they hate not knowing what to expect. Therefore when people around them decide on their own identity, they…

Stereotypes seem to be something we cannot escape. When I say we I am referring to we, as a people. We all are guilty of stereotyping one another, in fact it’s something that we learn to do, it usually first taught by our family. Stereotyping is basically wrongly believing all people are the same based off certain criteria’s. Once you are old enough to go to school and begin to interact with other culturally diverse people you pick and learn new things about others, and you began to stereotype…

Jared Diamond explores the history of the world from a unique view. An ecologist and evolutionary biologist himself, he was not particularly trained to examine the world in the way an anthropologist would. This book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society, delves into the known world and societies within it, at least as of 1997. Diamond wanted to uncover why history unfolded differently on the different continents over the last 13 thousand years, but more importantly he wanted to…

About fifthteen years later, my father married my mother on October 30, 1994. They were not really together until my father had the paperwork done after two years for my mother to come to America. My mother has struggled as much as my father did too. She had to live her homeland like Nguyen Qui-Duc did. She left her father, mother, brothers and sisters to be with my father. Furthermore, she worked numerous jobs as well, to be able to send money home to her side of the family. In order to help…

In Eleanor W. Traylor's essay "Two Afro-American Contributions to Dramatic Form" she discusses exactly what the title suggests – two Afro-American contributions to the dramatic form. The two contributions that she identifies are the minstrel show and the slave narrative. Traylor identifies the minstrel show as "performance by white actors in corked-black-face, burlesquing what they perceived as the speech, behavior, artifacts, and masking rituals of Afro-American slaves from whom they burgled…

black people in the northern colonies around the eighteenth century are rarely ever mentioned and it’s usually overshadowed by the lives of blacks in the south.The book Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England by William D. Piersen examines “Afro-Americans” in New England establishing a subculture for themselves amongst white New England natives. The author discusses in the book how black New Englanders in eighteenth-century intertwined…

narrative of Afro-American genre. It employed imagery and poetic intensity "dislodges the horrible from the category of the beautiful and places it into a category of the evil, the disgusting, the contemptible, and the decadent". (55) The black preacher is used as a stock character in drama. He is a trope and a master of "modes of eloquence". They were also used as a choral voice or a jester type character, as well as a warrior or communal voice. Overall, Traylor elaborates how the influence of…

In her essay Two Afro-American Contributions to Dramatic Form, Eleanor W. Traylor argues that African-Americans contributed two major contributions to the history of drama. One of these contributions is the minstrel show, which is a black tradition that was stolen to make offensive blackface shows. Masks associated with the minstrel show come from Yoruba traditions, and when the masks were appropriated, it was by a group of people who did not understand or appreciate their significance.…