Maya Angelou concludes her poem Still I Rise with the couplet “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave”. The gifts Angelou celebrates are the cultural inheritance of the African continent played out in the Americas. That culture is well documented in this new The Sage Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America. Described by the publisher as an “accessible ready reference on the retention and continuity of African culture within the United States”, the Encyclopedia contains an array of articles on cultural continuity and cultural traditions rooted in African culture recreated and modified by African Americans in North America. Edited by father and daughter scholars Mwalimu J. and Kenya J Shujaa, the collection is available in both print and digital format. Under review here is the digital format, navigated via the Sage Knowledge platform.
The digital platform allows readers to browse subjects alphabetically, enter search terms in a search box (note it does not compensate for spelling errors) and peruse topics via a subject index. Users may also opt to use the Reader’s Guide tab, which organizes the entries under eighteen broad subject headings, including Family Kinship and Community, Arts and Aesthetics, and Conferences, Institutions, Organizations and Publishers. Readers of the latter will find both historic activist groups, as well as organizations, presently involved in scholarship, activism and other arenas.
A sample entry by Paul Banahene Adjei, Adinkra Symbols of Ghana, gives a representative overview of the depth of the work as a whole. Adjei, a professor of social work at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, explores how Ghanaian Adinkra symbols have been co-opted into mainstream American culture, found in tattoo shops, architectural flourishes and in jewelry stores. The entry explains how before being stripped of their cultural context, these symbols held core meanings in Ghana and the diaspora. The symbols communicate cultural values and mores, tell stories and can represent national unity. More than simply describe these meanings, Adjei’s entry shows how a dominant culture can recontextualize symbols, in the process stripping them of their meaning and reconfiguring them as commodities lacking cultural context or significance. Adjei’s approach reflects the critical style found in many of the entries.
The Encyclopedia is vast, covering everything from Soul City, North Carolina, the first federally supported city development project managed by a black owned firm, to the concept of whiteness and its historic role in devaluing blackness. Unlike many reference works, The Sage Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America offers substantive interpretation and deconstruction of symbols, cultural markers and other topics. Given that each entry is written by a scholar of the subject who typically contextualizes the topic for the reader, some entries suffer from single-interpretative biases.
This volume would be particularly beneficial to schools with Africana and African American Studies programmes at both the undergraduate and graduate level but would also be useful for any library wishing to provide an in-depth reference work on how African cultures survived the journey to the Americas and how that journey both preserved and altered said cultures. Each individually authored entry provides the reader with enough information to aid in understanding more complex readings on the African cultural heritage and offers those new to the subject a digestible overview.
