This book is a product of a select and innovative “think tank,” NobbleAfriq Institute. It stands as the pillar and the revival of the African system of thought and spiritualism which, in turn, pave the road to Afro-modernity. For those seeking the answers to the root of the malady of our time in Africa, this book serves as a guide and inspiration. This book projects that the problem of Africa is Africa due to loss of intuitive thinking, freedom, and identity, which brought about the natural spiritual and psychological void known as “disintegrated individuality.” Failure of political leadership, lack of good governance, and stunted progress in Africa are not the main problems but symptoms of disintegrated individualism, which is a loss of sense of being. We are evolving beings; therefore, we can no longer search for our identity out of the old world of the past. Our old tribal and ancestral world are not lost but outgrown. As such, our identity and the meaning of who we are cannot be found; rather, they are to be created and achieved.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response fr

"Provides us with a masterful account of how socially marginalized segments of the African and Indian communities of Trinidad and Tobago developed trance-based religious cults linked with differing cultural heritages. Penetrating deeply into these two different communities with his careful fieldwork, he then places them within a brilliant account of the overall cultural history of this island nation."--Paul Younger, author of New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa This comparative study of African and Hindu popular religions in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago charts the development of religion in the Caribbean by analyzing the ways ecstatic forms of worship, enacted through trance performance and spirit mediumship, have adapted to capitalism and reconfigured themselves within the context of modernity. Showing how diasporic traditions of West African Orisha Worship and South Asian Shakti Puja converged in their ritual adaptations to colonialism in the West Indies, as well as diverged politically within the context of postcolonial multiculturalism, Keith McNeal reveals the unexpected ways these traditions of trance performance have become both globalized and modernized. The first book-length work to compare and contrast Afro- and Indo-Caribbean materials in a systematic and multidimensional manner, this volume makes fresh and innovative contributions to anthropology, religious studies, and the historiography of modernity. By giving both religious subcultures and their intersections equal attention, McNeal offers a richly textured account of southern Caribbean cultural history and pursues important questions about the history and future of religion.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool, 29 January until 25 April 2010.

Sterling A. Brown’s poetry and aesthetics are central to a proper understanding of African American art and politics of the early twentieth century. This study redefines the relationship between modernism and the New Negro era in light of Brown’s uniquely hybrid poetry and vision of a heterodox, pluralist modernism. Brown, also a folklorist and critic, saw the Harlem Renaissance and modernism as interactive rather than mutually exclusive and perceived the New Negro era as the dawning of African American modernity. Reading Brown’s three collections of poetry in light of their respective historical contexts, Sanders examines the ways in which Brown reconfigured black being and created alternative conceptual space for African Americans amid the prevailing racial discourses of American culture. Brown’s poetics call for revised conceptions of the Harlem Renaissance, black identity, artistic expression, and modernity that recognize the range, depth, and complexity of African American life.

In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are seen being photographed. Throughout the United States and Jamaica friends pose in front of hand-painted backgrounds of Tupac, flashy cars, or brand-name products popularized in hip-hop culture in countless makeshift roadside photography studios. And visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley remix the aesthetic of Western artists with hip-hop culture in their portraiture. In Shine, Krista Thompson examines these and other photographic practices in the Caribbean and United States, arguing that performing for the camera is more important than the final image itself. For the members of these African diasporic communities, seeking out the camera's light—whether from a cell phone, Polaroid, or video camera—provides a means with which to represent themselves in the public sphere. The resulting images, Thompson argues, become their own forms of memory, modernity, value, and social status that allow for cultural formation within and between African diasporic communities.

Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition