Keith A. Mayes . Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African‐American Holiday Tradition . New York : Routledge . 2009 . Pp. xxiv, 288. $26.95.
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.116.2.485
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoIn this book Keith A. Mayes defines Kwanzaa as “a hodgepodge of indigenous African practices placed inside a black American ritual framework” (p. 82). The “hodgepodge” origins of the Black Power holiday, which was invented by black cultural nationalist Maulana Karenga in December 1966, makes the phenomenal success of the seven‐day tradition all the more astonishing. The observance, which began as a grass‐roots ritual designed to assert Afrocentric culture and decry the crass commercialism of Christmas, had by the 1990s become an annual holiday sold by a corporate America eager to identify itself with “multiculturalism.” Mayes deftly traces the journey from Kwanzaa's Black Power roots to its evolution into a multicultural holiday embraced by multinational corporations and mainstream institutions including public schools, museums, and churches. By the late 1990s, even a group of white school children in northern Wisconsin celebrated the holiday with “right arm extended in the air and a clenched fist chanting Kwanzaa's ending slogan ‘Harambee’” (p. 137). Mayes's ability to explain this level of appropriation as something more than anomaly is one of the study's strengths.
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