Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dewulf, Jeroen

Titel

1619: The Dramatic Performance Traditions of North America's First Enslaved Africans

Ist Teil von

• Comparative drama, 2021-12, Vol.55 (4), p.417-442

Ort / Verlag

Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]film studio Lionsgate recently announced a partnership with the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Oprah Winfrey to adapt the Project into an expansive portfolio of new media content.3 Considering the likelihood that the 1619 community will remain in the spotlight, a better understanding of its cultural identity is highly relevant. [...]it aims to fill a lacuna in the New York Times' Project that stressed the importance of African Americans to the nation's performance culture yet omitted a reflection on the 1619 community's own cultural identity. When, in the 1930s, the Georgia Federal Writers' Program unit interviewed African Americans in the Sea Islands and asked them to identify some "Golla words," Tonie Houston mentioned "musungo tobacco, mulafo whiskey, and sisure chicken. A cow was called gombay and a hoggulluh'.'6 Every single one of these words derives from Kikongo/ Kimbundu, musungo from (n)sung(a) (tobacco/fragrance), mulafo from (ma)lafu or malavu (alcohol), sisure from (n)sus(s)u (chicken), gombay from ngombe (cow), and gulluh from ngulu (hog).7 The continuous use of these words, albeit in a creolized form, proves that cultural elements from the same Kikongo/Kimbundu-speaking regions where the 1619 community originated from were passed on among African Americans until at least the early twentieth century.