The Dismemberment of African Culture

This week’s lecture focused on the abandonment and dismemberment of African culture in the New World. There were different views on whether African culture was completely decimated or kept intact. One way scholars explain dismemberment is the way a new culture formed from the combination of African and European traditions, but primarily giving attention to European traditions. As slaves became deeply rooted into American society, African traditions remained such as dancing, music, medicine, etc. Sharla Fett explains how medicine men and women used traditional African remedies to cure people because they did not get it from the white doctors. Therefore, these aspects preserved African culture. However, over the decades, African traditions began to disappear as African Americans began to slowly assimilate into white society. As generations became further removed from the first Africans that were brought over, African culture was not preserved and blacks were uneducated on certain aspects. Gomez’s suggestion for transforming academic knowledge is to “rewrite the history of the Americas [by] emphasizing the African presence and impact.” Recognizing and emphasizing the African presence will allow intellectual freedom.