Sunday, February 20, 2011

African Diasporic Voices-Movement


African Diasporic Voices - - Theme #2 Movement:

Movement-(Individuals, families and communities move continuously, sometimes seeking fresh prospects, sometimes forced by slavery, war or famine. Always, our movements reinvent us, remixing the possibilities.)

As children of the African Diaspora we have gone  through constant and continuous movement.  Whether we are trying to find our way back home, trying to create a home where we have arrived, or just trying to understand and define who we have become in a new place and reestablish our origin story for the new generation coming, we are a people of transformation.  We are constant primarily in each generations almost involuntary need to redefine ourselves.  The most obvious example is found in our naming of ourselves. 
Taking a quick look at the naming of our racial/ethnic groupings,  the process seems almost a sort of adaptation of the naming ceremony.  First Negro, then Colored, then Black, Then African-American, Afro-Caribbean, then Afro-Indian, and now with the influx of African Immigrants, many of our youth are beginning to establish whether they are African-American (descendents) or simply calling themselves, Black American.  Just as our music comes from the pulse of our movement from rural to urban, so too does the naming of ourselves and our culture.  And the change can happen so quickly.
In the most recent winter Olympics, Cheltzie Lee, a young women with an African-American mother from Louisiana and a Chinese father (born in Bangladesh) who has grown up in Australia, represented Australia.  Could she have developed to such an advanced and honorable place as an Olympic Ice skater in America?  I don’t know.  But what I do know is that the movement,  from American to Australian is clearly significant.  How significant? I'll leave that to you to decide.


(I know the commentary is in russian, but I liked the camera angles.)


Are you someone who feels a significant difference in your life and how others see your blackness, african-ness due to your geographical location? 


THINK ABOUT IT. TALK ABOUT IT. POEM ABOUT IT! (link, subscribe, share, comment!)


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

No comments: