Spring 2021 Gullah Geechee Virtual Research Tour

First published in 1982, Daufuskie Island vividly captured life on a South Carolina Sea Island before the arrival of resort culture through the photographs of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and words of Alex Haley.

The ten essays in The Crucible of Carolina explore the connections between the language and culture of South Carolina's barrier islands, West Africa, the Caribbean, and England. Decades before any formal, scholarly interest in South Carolina barrier life, outsiders had been commenting on and documenting the "African" qualities of the region's black inhabitants. These qualities have long been manifest in their language, religious practices, music, and material culture.

Gullah Inspired Riddimic Studies can be used across disciplines ranging from visual art to dance. The book opens up polyrhythm, cross rhythm and poly-meter in new and challenging ways that will inspire unique takes on syncopation. Pleasant is a professional percussionist who grew up in Sapelo Island, McIntosh County and coastal Georgia. His work has been enriched by the peculiar rhythmic harmony of Gullah/Geechee culture for over 25 years.

In 1989, 1998, and 2005, fifteen Gullah speakers went to Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa to trace their origins and ancestry. Their journey frames this exploration of the extraordinary history of the Gullah culture-characterized by strong African cultural retention and a direct influence on American culture, particularly in the South-described in this fascinating book. Since long before the Revolution, America has had hidden pockets of a bygone African culture with a language of its own, and long endowed with traditions, language, design, medicine, agriculture, fishing, hunting, weaving, and the arts. This book explores the Gullah culture's direct link to Africa, via the sea islands of the American southeast.

A rich potpourri of articles and paintings on Gullah art, history, fiction, recipes, and language.

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole. Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represents a call for multidisciplinary, collaborative, and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.

Includes a chapter by Andrea Benton Rushing: "The Feast of Good Death: an Afro-Catholic emancipation celebration in Brazil"

This book is a documentation and artistic preservation of the history and culture of the Gullah People along the Carolina Lowcountry. This Gullah-Geechee culture came from West Africa and was passed down by Sea Island slaves to subsequent generations. Therefore, this culture has survived despite many changes and displacements. The people of this area are aware of their culture and traditions and are still living in these isolated areas by choice. Though some communities that were isolated and tucked away way for decades are now seeing their land in great demand for development, they continue to live as they have for generations. Their history comes alive within the pages of this book, which includes illustrations and pictures by the author.

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants--people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World.

The Gullah people of St. Helena Island still relate that their people wanted to "catch the learning" after northern abolitionists founded Penn School in 1862, less than six months after the Union army captured the South Carolina sea islands. In this broad history Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross range across the past 150 years to reacquaint us with the far-reaching impact of a place where many daring and innovative social justice endeavors had their beginnings.