Negritude: A Universal Heritage; from the Quartier Latin in France to the City of Chicago in the United States of America (Published)
Black is beautiful! Such words from Martin Luther King are much telling about the inner meaning of movements like that of Negritude. Born out of the wings of racism and exclusion, the Negritude movement voiced out the strong need to step out of any form of inferiority complex. With a vision that africanized the notion of Africanity, the movement crossed borders to find roots in the Western and Caribbean lands before fostering around the world. Thus, in this paper, it is targeted to show up how Léopol Sedar Senghor’s and his likes’ positions that splashed away the negative image stuck on the the Black man for centuries, through a cultural crusade. A re-reading of the Negritude is recoursed to to update the other forms of negritude-oriented expressions the African Diaspora has been experiencing so far. Based on the theory of multiculturalism, our analysis has put forwards the challenging exercise to know oneself before any attempt to merge into the main stream of cultural identities.
Keywords: Africanity, Colonialism, Multiculturalism, Racism, global south, negritude
Creative Performing Arts as Major Means of Promoting Multiculturalism: Nigeria Experience (Published)
Creative Performing Arts is at times restricted to Theatre and Music or segments under them. The reason behind this notion is not unconnected with the process Theatre and Music take. However, by its name; Creative Performing Arts is an art that includes action in which intensions conceived are exhibited in practice as artists. This intension in question could be expressed through visual art or acting-out process that involves creative skill. Visual art stays for as long as the producer desires, while acting-out art lingers in the mind of the beholder after the display of skills has been struck out. The medium of expression in these arts could be peculiar to the choice of the producer (s). It has been observed that creative performing art has been seen as those arts that concern or have relationship with theatre and music because many have not seen visual art process as part of performing art. This means that all the arts have the quality to perform within its ambits which later results to production. Visual, Theatre and music arts are performances that tilt towards promoting multiculturalism. How possible is this? This paper examines the interrelationship of these arts in promoting multicultural heritage of Nigeria people. The paper goes further to interrogate the performing skills in each of these branches of art. It concludes by auditing their performing details with suggestion on how to bridge the existing artificial partition created by practitioners through integrating them with a compound nomenclature
Keywords: : creative performing arts, Multiculturalism, Visual Art, theatre art and music
AN EXAMINATION OF MULTICULTURALISM AND RACISM IN EDGAR MITTELHOLZER’S A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (Published)
This paper is examines Mittelholzer’s depiction of the multicultural and multiracial character of the West Indies in his novel, A Morning at the Office. It unfolds that the West Indies is inhabited by various peoples, from different parts of the globe and who had no indigenous link or ancestral claim on the islands. The paper further traces the roots of this multiculturalism in the West Indies and how it has engendered racism to the various colonial ideological onslaughts on the Islands, the importation of millions of African captives as well as the presence of Chinese and East Indians who served as planters and overseers on the newly established mines and plantation. Indeed, it is this conglomerate of peoples with diverse cultures that has made the Islands to be described as “A Stew Pot’. It is the submission of this paper that in a multicultural society, the issues of racism and racial segregation abound. The paper particularly uses Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office to project this view. At the end it asserts that the West Indies can only maintain its genuine national identity if all racial barriers are removed and the various races learn to appreciate the cultural and racial diversities of the Islands without prejudice to skin pigmentation.
Keywords: Identity, Multiculturalism, Racism, Stew Pot