Africana Studies

Thursday, November 12th 2009
African Retention Where ever Europeans imported slaves from Africa, they also unwillingly, imported the culture, language, art, literature, culinary, and music of those individuals. In today’s global culture we can retrace the African influence in any society that held African slaves. The retention of that African heritage show the large part African culture impacted the world around us today, despite the misconceptions of the Eurocentric world to dismiss any of that integration and assimilation of cultures.
The retention of African traditions and culture is different everywhere, many factors play a role on the amount of Africanism that traveled across the Atlantic. In the United States, the melting pot of people and cultures, the African heritage is so deeply rooted into the culture that most people don’t recognize the transatlantic influence and simply believe that it is part of the American culture (Bennett, 2007). While people like Franklin Frazier, an African American sociologist, advocated that African retentions in the United States “were negligible because the African was totally stripped of his culture by the process of enslavement” (Peek & Yankah, 2004). However several aspects of African Creative modes can be perceived in the American society, from oral tradition, the southern food, agricultural imports, dance moves, musical rhythms, and dialectal languages to arts. Oral traditions, storytelling and proves are African traditions that can be found almost anywhere in Africa (Azevedo, 2005). Slaves told story to and hid messages in those story to help the next generations. The same way African food and cooking styles can be found all over the South of the United States, using yams, rice and other typical African dishes. Dances like the Charleston and some contemporary moves are similar to African traditional dances that have been passed on from generation to generation (Loury, Fall2009). Although