African Masters

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White Slaves, African Masters

Author: Paul Baepler
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 1999-05-15
Some of the most popular stories in nineteenth-century America were sensational tales of whites captured and enslaved in North Africa. White Slaves, African Masters for the first time gathers together a selection of these Barbary captivity narratives, which significantly influenced early American attitudes toward race, slavery, and nationalism. Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery. The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat. Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative. "Baepler has done American literary and cultural historians a service by collecting these long-out-of-print Barbary captivity narratives . . . . Baepler's excellent introduction and full bibliography of primary and secondary sources greatly enhance our knowledge of this fascinating genre."—Library Journal
American Slaves and African Masters

Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a system that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach, placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara. This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
African Musical Aesthetics

Author: John Murungi
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Release Date: 2011-05-25
In the West, philosophy is generally confined to the domain of the intellect, and music to the domain of the emotion. This book makes either domain the location for the other. African musical aesthetics constitutes this location, and has its home in it. Moreover, since the separation of the domain of the intellect and the domain of emotion represents a bifurcation of what it is to be a human being, and by making either domain the location of the other, what African musical aesthetics accomplishes is the affirmation of a unified sense of what it is to be a human being. Accordingly, the unity of philosophy and music give rises to a unified sense of being human. It is to such unity that African musical aesthetics takes us. For African musical aesthetics to accomplish this task, this book challenges the conventional Western understanding of philosophy—an understanding that projects Africa as devoid of philosophy. It is this projection that pervaded Africa during the colonial period, and it is the projection that is challenged in African philosophy. From an African philosophical perspective African musical aesthetics turns out to be an emancipatory process that seeks to affirm the humanity of Africans but also a process that seeks to affirm common humanity. Music is not solely a matter of audiology, what is played, or what one dances to. It has its elemental task in calling our attention to what we are as human beings. In so far as it is sensuous, it constitutes us as members of the sensible world, and links us intrinsically to all that is sensuous. It is more than humanism. Music registers us as members of nature. It is nature naturing.