Africanisms in American Culture Book

A review of the first edition of this work--perhaps obviously--may not reflect the quality of second edition Holloway produced of this book, so my thoughts here may not necessarily reflect viewpoints of those who have only read the second edition of Africanisms in American Culture. However, Goodreads groups these two editions together, so any critiques I provide may not apply to the 2005 edition.

In academia, older editions of a republished text may have less credibility than later iterations of the same text, but that does not always mean that the original texts become irrelevant. In the case of Africanisms in American culture, the original edition feels more dated than other scholarship from the early 1990s, and may not be as relevant as I hoped. Perhaps this is because most contemporary scholars in Black studies accept the central argument in this book--that African cultures did not disappear amongst the victims of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, that African cultures shaped both African American and white American identities during enslavement and its afterlife. This tenant could be revolutionary to newer scholars, i.e. those whose learning about the African diaspora in a global context is still at an early stage. However, even if I found myself learning less from this scholarship than I anticipated, I did discover some interesting insights throughout, especially in John Edward Philips's "The African Heritage of White America."

Some of the dated-ness in the 1990 edition has some problematic implications. Holloway surveys an excellent general history of terminology pertaining to Black identity in his introduction, but he and other writers also use the problematic term "Bantu," a term that a South African friend of mine once described to me as having the pejorative power we American's associate with the 'n-word." Similarly, this oversight, as well as the oversight that comes with using the spelling "voodoo" rather than preferred forms like vodun, makes me question the academic distance that exists between the scholars present here and the subjects they are writing about.