Notes Introduction 1. Daughters of the Dust was written, directed, and produced by Julie Dash. 2. See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), Remembering Generations : Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001), and “The Neo-Slave Narrative,” The Cambridge Companion to The African American Novel, ed., Maryemma Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). 3. Although Reagan has been criticized with regard to social welfare, Hugh Heclo argues that Reagan’s legacy is much more mixed and that the overall result “was to consolidate rather than roll back America’s middle-class welfare state” (558). He further asserts that there was no Reagan Revolution against the welfare state. See Hugh Heclo, “The Mixed Legacies of Ronald Reagan,” Presidential Quarterly 38.4 (2008): 555–74. 4. Barthold’s emphasis on the Guinea Coast as the origin of most enslaved Africans is supported by the assessment of scholars: Sterling Stuckey, Philip Curtin, and James H. Rawley who contend that the majority of slaves came from the central and western regions of Africa. See Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & The Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969), and James H. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). 5. Although I discuss African religion and culture, it is important to remember that Africa is a vast continent with much variety, and thus I am limiting my comments to overarching generalities. However, I do think it is possible to look to shared customs and traditions of Western Africa and surmise that many of these were represented in the views of Africans forcibly removed and enslaved in the New World. 6. I should note that I have chosen the term ancestors to describe the spirits and living dead present in these texts because they are indeed related to 191 192 Notes to Chapter 1 one or more characters in the text. However, Mbiti argues against the use of “ancestral spirits” or “ancestors” as these terms are unnecessarily limiting since some spirits and living-dead are not actually ancestors (African 83–84). 7. According to Thompson and Cornet, “Philip Curtin has estimated that fully one-third of United States blacks are of Kongo and Angola ancestry . . .” (32). 8. See Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941), Winifred Kellersberger Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: UCLA, Center for Afro-American Studies, 1979), Roger Abrahams and John Szwed, After Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988), and Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) among others. 9. See Figure 1. The Kalûnga line separates the physical world, ku nseke, from the spiritual world, ku mpèmba. Kala is the first position, followed by Tukula, Luvèmba, and Musoni. 10. African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo: Tying the Spiritual Knot: Principlies of Life & Living was published under the name, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau; however, he refers to himself as Fu-Kiau Bunseki. 11. Although some trace Kongo crosses to the crucifix, Thompson and Cornet note that “it is the consensus of a variety of scholars who have studied the motif in cultural context, that the sign of the four moments of the sun predates the coming of the Portuguese” (44). 12. See Thompson and Cornet pages 27–28 and Fu-Kiau pages 20–21. 13. See Fu-Kiau 139. 14. In Introduction to African Religion, Mbiti notes that spirits or ghosts sometimes “act in unpleasant ways towards people, and sometimes in beneficial ways” (77). 15. Because there is not this distinction between the living-dead and spirits within African American communities, I have not created separate categories as Fu-Kiau does with the Luvèmba and Musoni stages and instead think of both stages as indicative of the ancestral role. 16. Ancestor veneration is an expression of respect, not to be confused with ancestor worship. Practitioners show respect and admiration for their ancestors, but they do not worship them as gods. In fact, Fairley notes that ministers she interviewed...