The African Roots of the Literature Black Diaspora Essay Example

The African Roots of the Literature Black Diaspora Essay Example The African Roots of the Literature Black Diaspora Essay The African Roots of the Literature Black Diaspora Essay Abstract This paper examines the oral traditions of Africa and how those cultural practices have given birth to and shaped the literary culture of Black America. While it does not attempt to examine the entire gamut of literary creations in the Americas, the paper references, briefly, the black American oral folklore and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance – drawing parallels between the oral culture of Africa and the literature of Black America and the Caribbean. Key Words: traditions shaped Americasgamut creations Harlem RenaissanceCaribbean Introduction The issue of black self-consciousness has gone past the debate about whether the blood link between the black American and the African is a figure of speech. The blood that flows in the veins of the African-American (or the black man anywhere in the world) is ontological, not a rhetorical, phenomenon. So saying, we attempt to establish that far from being a historical accident predicated upon a similarity of fate and political experiences, this tie is inexorably derived from an immutability of genes. We stress that the connection between the African and the black man in the Americas is intrinsical, a symbiosis. We intend to point out that black African culture is a source and bi-product of black American cultural expression. Main Discussion The slave trade was the vehicle for the resettlement of the black man in the new world. This trans-Atlantic experience became instrumental in the establishment of the cultural practices of black Africa in the Americas. For, slavery imported not only slaves but a plethora of social and cultural artifacts such as music, rhetoric, folklore, religion, even the belief in, and creation of, myths and legends – subsumed in folklore – and, of course, the rivers of African blood carried in the veins of these human commodities. Now the African in the Americas has been tagged inferior to his white co-settlers. This is not becau