In his groundbreaking study of the Akan diaspora, Kwasi Konadu demonstrates how this cultural group originating in West Africa both engaged in and went beyond the familiar diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never formed a majority among other Africans in the Americas. But their leadership skills in war and political organization, efficacy in medicinal plant use and spiritual practice, and culture archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far outweighed their sheer numbers. Konadu argues that a composite Akan culture calibrated between the Gold Coast and forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. The book examines the Akan experience in Guyana, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, former Danish and Dutch colonies, and North America, and how those early experiences foreground the modern engagement and movement of diasporic Africans and Akan people between Ghana and North America. Locating the Akan variable in the African diasporic equation allows scholars and students of the Americas to better understand how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still evolving.

The Akan Diaspora in the Americas

History

Konadu, Kwasi

Africa

Oxford University Press

Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 offers an African-centric interpretation of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on careful reading of Africans' oral histories and traditions, written documents, and visual evidence, the book focuses not on the mechanics or operation of the Atlantic slaving system, but rather on the beliefs, ideas, and worldviews of the Africans who experienced it. It examines the internal workings of African societies and their members at various strata in the transatlantic era, strongly emphasizing the global context and the multiplicity of African experiences during that period, and interpreting the process of transatlantic slaving and its consequences through largely African and diasporic primary sources. By integrating Africans' viewpoints with critical interpretations, Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 balances intellectual rigor with broad accessibility, helping students to think about the Atlantic slave trade from a new perspective.

Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 (African World Histories)

In 1969, The East, a cultural and educational center for people of African ancestry, was founded by dedicated educators and progressive activists who came of age during the era of the Black Power movement. Although Brooklyn was the physical home of The East organization, its influence emanated throughout New York City and beyond, touching individuals and groups in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. A View from The East represents a second edition of the previously published Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again by providing expanded archival research and a contextualizing of the organization within the African American civil rights and black power movements. At the heart of The East was Uhuru Sasa Shule, an independent African-centered school whose curriculum and pedagogy were rooted in Kawaida philosophy and concepts of education for self-reliance. In addition, The East became a center for the arts. On weekends, it served as a literary salon and hosted concerts by black musicians. Many of the great jazz artists and poets performed there, as it became a well-known and highly sought-after venue. With fresh insight and great detail, Kwasi B. Konadu excavates the legacy of The East, exploring the confluence of cultural nationalism, education, economic self-sufficiency, and the arts during the Black Power period. Drawing on extensive interviews and primary research, Konadu vividly brings to life the people and events that shaped this remarkable institution and outlines the rich lessons it provides for future community building organizations.

A View from the East: Black Cultural Nationalism and Education in New York City

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Syracuse Univ Pr

What and who constitutes world history? What makes a history a "world" history? What is the "world" with which world history is concerned? Can another "world" be considered? Scholars of African birth or descent are acutely absent in the writing of and debates concerning world history, inept when it comes to the foregoing questions, and invisible in the production of worldly historical knowledge. Once known as the continent without history or historical consciousness, Africa and its intellectuals represent a much larger segment of the marginalized intellectual world. In fact, the African Network in Global History, founded in 2009 at the University of Ilorin (Nigeria), is the clearest evidence of African scholars' tardy entry into a world history discourse, as well as support for studies in world history that address Africa and the world as seen from African perspectives. We can only begin to answer the above questions when the former peoples and places without history rewrite world history. Certainly, the world should constitute and make a "world history" driven by perspectives on the world rather than a Eurasian world of perspectives. In the past three decades, writers of world history have focused comparatively on historical themes and recurring processes. In their history and traditions, writers of world history and their past exemplars share more than a Eurasian origin; the older traditions modeled by Herodotus of ancient Greece and Sima Qian of China viewed the world through the superiority of their own societies, and current European or white historians honed their views in the context of imperialism and colonialism. Implicit in those traditions is that world history research and writing began when Europeans discovered the world outside of Europe. Consequently, formerly unknown peoples of Africa and the Americas had to fit within Christian frames of history that remained until the twentieth century and, in some cases, the twenty-first century. Reading the World combines the strength of recent scholarship and research-based monographs, the coherency of single authorship, and the presentation and somewhat narrative style of textbooks. Reading the World provides an intellectually stimulating, authoritative, and engaging history that is both concise and global in scope, and offers a readable introduction to a challenging topic. Reading the World also aims to challenge the way readers think about the histories of people and places of the globe and how they and others might interpret or write their own "world" histories. This book does not attempt a "grand narrative" or provide a recipe textbook with prefabricated questions, test banks, audiovisual supplements, and indigestible sequences of "facts" and historical events packaged in such a way that you think less and forgo your creativity. Rather, Reading the World is but one of what should be a number of world history monographs representing an integral contribution from the historically marginalized in worldly historical knowledge and its production, engaging in the unfinished and fascinating conversation of a composite world history.

Reading the World: An African Perspective on World History

Diasporic Africa Press

Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation

<div>Kofi D&#7440;nk&#7440; was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers D&#7440;nk&#7440;'s life story and experiences in a communography of D&#7440;nk&#7440;'s community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although D&#7440;nk&#7440; touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.</div>

Religion & Spirituality

Duke University Press Books

Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.

Truth Crushed To The Earth Will Rise Again!: The East Organization And The Principles And Practice Of Black Nationalist Development

Africa World+press

About the Author\nKwasi Konadu is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor at Colgate University, teaching worldwide African histories and cultures. He is the author of Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation; and co-editor of The Ghana Reader.\nThis book presents rare evidence about the lives of three African women in the sixteenth century--the very period from which we can trace the origins of global empires, slavery, capitalism, modern religious dogma and anti-Black violence. These features of today's world took shape as Portugal built a global empire on African gold and bodies. Forced labor was essential to the world economy of the Atlantic basin, and afflicted many African women and girls who were enslaved and manumitted, baptised and unconvinced.\nWhile some women liaised with European and mixed-race men along the West African coast, others, ordinary yet bold, pushed back against new forms of captivity, racial capitalism, religious orthodoxy and sexual violence, as if they were already self-governing. Many Black Women of this Fortress lays bare the insurgent ideas and actions of Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, charting how they advocated for themselves and exercised spiritual and female power. Theirs is a collective story, written from obscurity; from the forgotten and overlooked colonial records. By drawing attention to their lives, we dare to grasp the complexities of modernity's gestation.

Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire

World

Hurst

Using diverse and new sources (archaeological, biomedical, climatological, linguistic, ethno-musical, oral and documentary sources in various languages), this groundbreaking study tells the story of a West African people, the origins and character of their cultural forms and ideas, and how these Akan, or "pioneering peoples," shaped the politics and societies of their homeland as well as the European colonies that received their enslaved members. The book demonstrates how these peoples organized themselves into clans connected by shared sociocultural features, formed polities, fought wars yet engaged in extensive diplomacy, traded with yet competed against one another, and ultimately their members became a force in the Americas, despite their relatively small numbers. As enslaved, marooned, or legally emancipated peoples, they foregrounded and yet went beyond the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom. Locating the Akan variable in the African diasporic equation allows scholars and students of Africa and the Americas to better understand how African histories and diasporic experiences cohere and how both are still evolving.

Akan Pioneers: African Histories, Diasporic Experiences

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Books by Konadu, Kwasi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Konadu, Kwasi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Akan Diaspora in the Americas

Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 (African World Histories)

The Akan Diaspora in the Americas

A View from the East: Black Cultural Nationalism and Education in New York City

Reading the World: An African Perspective on World History

Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation

Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation

Truth Crushed To The Earth Will Rise Again!: The East Organization And The Principles And Practice Of Black Nationalist Development

Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire

Akan Pioneers: African Histories, Diasporic Experiences