From Global to Specific: Kwanzaa Music, or the Quest for Afro-American Identity
2002; Éditions de l'EHESS; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1777-5353
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoFrom Global to Specific: Kwanzaa Music or the Quest for African-American Identity. African Americans have increasingly been in the quest for cultural and historical markers enabling them to revive a lost African identity. With the development of Afrocentric theories and curricula in the 1990s, the quest for Africanisms no longer seems an adequate method to reappropriate African American cultural identity. Maulana Karenga's Kwanzaa, despite its rather early creation, only recently witnessed musical developments. This new dimension of a specifically African American cultural event may only be a commercial aspect of a phenomenon now receiving a great deal of media attention, or it may actually contribute to African Americans' return to a motherland African heritage. The purpose of this paper is to depict how the introduction of music genres from the diaspora in the ritualized Kwanzaa celebrations is part of African Americans' claim to a double belonging: being part of both a historical African diaspora and a minority identity forged through time.
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