Focusing on expressions of popular culture among blacks in Africa, the United States, and the Carribean this collection of multidisciplinary essays takes on subjects long overdue for study. Fifteen essays cover a world of topics, from American girls\u2019 Double Dutch games to protest discourse in Ghana; from Terry McMillan\u2019s Waiting to Exhale to the work of Zora Neale Hurston; from South African workers to Just Another Girl on the IRT; from the history of Rasta to the evolving significance of kente clothl from rap video music to hip-hop to zouk. The contributors work through the prisms of many disciplines, including anthropology, communications, English, ethnomusicology, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political economy, psychology, and social work. Their interpretive approaches place the many voices of popular black cultures into a global context. It affirms that black culture everywhere functions to give meaning to people\u2019s lives by constructing identities that resist cultural, capitolist, colonial, and postcolonial domination.

Rituals are among the most enduring aspects of the African cultural landscape. They appear to exist outside of time, eternal and unchanging. Joseph Adjaye argues that while rituals may seem to be static, in reality, they are dynamic and changing. Through intense analysis of child naming ceremonies, libations, puberty initiation rights, funerals and two major Ghanaian festivals, Adjaye explores the interplay between ritual and audience interaction and participation. By so doing, he shows the many ways rituals have provided Ghanaians with a means to conceptualize and change their present and shape their future. In other words, rituals help individuals escape the boundaries of self by promoting a sense of collective purpose and agency. This book will appeal to not only Africanists, but to readers interested in the roles rituals play in their own lives and the ways that rituals encourage socially transforming initiatives.

In the first book which deals entirely with the subject of time in Africa and the Black Diaspora, Adjaye presents ten critical case studies of selected communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. The essays cover a wide spectrum of manifestations of temporal experience, including cosmological and genealogical time, physical and ecological cycles, time and worldview, social rhythm, agricultural and industrial time, and historical processes and consciousness. The studies confirm the continuity of temporal experience among Africans from pre-colonial times, through the colonial period in Africa, across continents through slavery and Maroon societies, to present-day communities like the Gullah of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The subject of time, now recognized to be relative rather than uniform, draws together evidence from a variety of disciplines, specifically history, linguistics, political science, anthropology, and philosophy.