Africanisms 13(1941), Lorenzo D. Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dia-
lect (1949), and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black
Consciousness (1978) studied the African cultural elements
in the music, language, folklore, sculpture, textiles, and re-
ligion of African Americans. In their works, the scholars
developed many theories that demonstrate substantial re-
tention of African culture in the United States.
According to Christopher L. Miller, the term “Afri-
canism” refers to the study of the retaining African speech
patterns, styles, or performance. In a similar tone, V. Y. Mu-
dimbe associates the word “Africanism” with the approach
that early scholars such as Maurice Delafosse, Melville J.
Herskovits, and Claude Levi-Strauss developed in the 1950s
and 1960s in order to analyze African legends, fables, and
oral traditions and develop data that could contribute to
understandings of people of African descent. Yet the study
of Africanisms in the Americas is traceable to the debate
on the genesis of African American culture which, accord-
ing to Lawrence Levine, began in the 1860s when white
American folklorists such as Lucy McKim, D. K. Wilgus,
and William Francis Allen attempted to study the structure
and origin of slave religious music. Th is work, which was
the genesis of the White-to-Black school of acculturation,
maintained that religious music among African Americans
imitated European compositions with slight variations.
By the 1920s, James Weldon Johnson and Alain LeRoy
Locke, two major scholars of the Harlem Renaissance, chal-
lenged the White-to-Black thesis. In Th e Book of American
Negro Spirituals (1925), Johnson notes that black spirituals
were derived solely by people of African descent under the
conditions of living in alien environments. Like Johnson,
Alain Locke believes that the early African slaves in the
United States created the spirituals. Yet Locke views these
songs as part of an African American tradition that is also
the heritage of all Americans. Locke’s theory of the diverse
origins of the spirituals is apparent in his 1925 essay “Th e
Negro Spirituals” where he argues that the songs are both
African American and American. Unlike most early schol-
ars, Locke stresses the resilience, humanity, and universal-
ity of the spirituals.
Despite Locke’s thesis that the spirituals are American
and universal at the same time, the debate on African re-
tentions has remained centered on whether the elements
in African American culture are of European or African
origins. In the fi rst half of the 20th century, some black
scholars denied outright that any remnant of Africanismsand practiced a combination of these religions. Claiming to
be having “Christian” gatherings (so as not to be punished
by their owners for practicing African religions), slaves
would engage in these hybrid religious practices as a way of
preserving some aspects of their spiritual traditions.
Th ese populations, cultures, and themes are currently
studied under the fi eld of Diaspora Studies. Th is fi eld was
created in the late 20th century and addresses a variety of dis-
placed or dispersed ethnic populations as well as the cultures
born of these geographical shift s. As myriad Diaspora stud-
ies scholars have indicated, the term “Diaspora” has the con-
notation of forced movement due to exile, national confl ict,
slavery, or racism. Preeminent scholars of African Diaspora
Studies include Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Robin
D. G. Kelley, Carole Boyce Davies, and Henry Louis Gates.
Th e African Diaspora in the United States continues
to grow and become more diverse thanks to recent histo-
ries of immigration to the United States from certain parts
of Africa, specifi cally Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Guinea,
Rwanda, and Burundi. Th us, the African Diaspora in
America is a constantly shift ing and growing cultural phe-
nomenon. It changes with each wave of immigrants and set
of cultures that enter the country and evolves when these
cultures meet and intermingle with the preexisting cultures
in a certain geographical area.
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Black Atlantic; Pan-
Africanism; Trans-Saharan Slave Trade
Jen Westmoreland BouchardBibliography
Davies, Carole Boyce, Ali A. Mazrui, and Isidore Okpewho, eds.
Th e African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identi-
ties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Gilroy, Paul. Th e Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conscious-
ness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gomez, Michael Angelo. Reversing Sail: A History of the African
Diaspora. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hamilton, Ruth Simms. Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African
Diaspora. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007.
Africanisms
For most of the 20th century, historians have explored the
continuity of African culture in the United States. Stud-
ies such as Melville J. Herskovits’s Myth of the Negro Past