Articulating the African Diaspora through Rhythm

The African diaspora: history, adaptation and health.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade brought millions of Africans to the New World. Advances in genomics are providing novel insights into the history and health of Africans and the diasporan populations. Recent examples reviewed here include the unraveling of substantial hunter-gatherer and 'Eurasian' admixtures across sub-Saharan Africa, expanding our understanding of ancestral African genetics; th...

Cystic Fibrosis in the African Diaspora.

Identifying mutations that cause cystic fibrosis (CF) is important for making an early, unambiguous diagnosis, which, in turn, is linked to better health and a greater life expectancy. In patients of African descent, a molecular diagnosis is often confounded by the fact that the majority of investigations undertaken to identify causative mutations have been conducted on European populations, an...

Sonic Diaspora, Vibrations and Rhythm Thinking through the Sounding of the Jamaican Dancehall Session

The propagation of vibrations may provide a better way of understanding diasporic spread than the conventional focus on the circulation of products (Hall 1980, Appadurai 1986, 1996, Gilroy 1993a, Brah 1996). Jamaican sound systems operate as a broadcast medium and a source of CDs, DVDs and other commercial products (Henriques 2007a). But the dancehall sound system session also propagates a broa...

Plural in the African- American Diaspora

T LNDERLXNG CATEGORY OF PLURAL, along with its morphological expression by way of the suffix -s, has been considered a robust, if variable, feature of African-American English grammar at least since Harrison (1884) observed that "the Negro forms the plural regularly by addition of s or 2." (225). Subsequent empirical research on different varieties of contemporary African-American Vernacular En...

AFRICAN DIASPORA AND AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT Background paper for AfroNeth