Preface:

Since the colonial period, Philadelphia has been home to communities with African ethnic and cultural roots. Indeed, Philadelphia continues to be a significant port-of-call in the African Diaspora, a vital threshold to that modern political and counter-cultural formation that Paul Gilroy calls “the Black Atlantic.” Throughout the metropolitan area and surrounding Delaware Valley we found touchstones to every stage in the still unfolding history of the Black Atlantic: from Congo Square (now Washington Square) to well-known stations on the Underground Railroad; from Merion Cemetery to the displaced graves of Mt. Olivet; from the theater districts of North Broad Street and West Philadelphia’s Fifty Second Street, to the West African and West India ethnoscapes – restaurants, churches, community gardens, hair braiding salons, and markets – that are transforming the spaces of Woodland and Lancaster Avenues today.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, African American neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, settled by descendants of slaves who migrated from the south to find work, have begun absorbing thousands of West Indian and African immigrants. The languages, dress, religious practices, foodways, and cultural styles of African ethnic groups are as distinctive as those of European or Asian ethnic groups, but the historical and cultural reasons for distinctions – and similarities – are not well understood. Teachers in this seminar conducted fieldwork exercises among their students as well as extensive research on cultures of the Black Atlantic to develop a framework that would heighten the relevance of standard curricula for students of diverse backgrounds while ameliorating ethnic tensions that have led to physical violence in recent years.

Through readings, field assignments, and class discussions, teachers in this seminar explored three premises: 1) the idea of the Black Atlantic offers a historical and theoretical framework for identifying and building upon expressions of a shared African cultural aesthetic among students in West Philadelphia schools; 2) as a portal on the Black Atlantic, West Philadelphia is possessed of living, African-based vernaculars of language, music, dance, food, visual arts, healing, dress, and bodily style; and 3) these African-based vernaculars form a threshold to the history of the Black Atlantic, and a means of understanding cultural similarities and differences that are subtended by shared aesthetic, social, and spiritual values.