Speakers Bureau Speaker
Akua Duku Anokye, Glendale
Akua Duku Anokye is an Associate Professor of Africana Language, Literature and Culture at ASU and director of First Year Composition at ASU West campus. Anoky’s research interests include Africana orality and literacy, Africana women's archetypes, Ghanaian folktales, and storytelling.
Presentations are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
African American Life and Culture in El Mirage
This presentation features a video documentary of early African American settlers to El Mirage who made significant cultural, historical, and economic contributions to Arizona in the late 1940s through the 1960s. El Mirage was surrounded by cotton fields and consisted mostly of Hispanic migrant families, though there were also African Americans who migrated from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma to work in the cotton fields. Families such as the Cutrights, Marshalls, and Dunbars went on to found churches and to become civic and social leaders in the Arizona community. Using oral history transcripts, photographs, ephemera, drawings, and maps, this presentation tells the story of early African American settlers that resided in El Mirage.
• Host organization provides a screen and speakers.
Other People’s Children: African American Community Mothers, Community Activists
Traditionally there have been three levels of motherhood in the African Diaspora: the biological mother; the surrogate mother, typically an aunt or a grandmother; and the community mother who works on behalf of the community, caring for and taking responsibility for community affairs. Discover the fascinating connections between the assertive characteristics of the African goddess/ancestress, Nana Esi, and women of the African Diaspora involved in the civil rights and labor movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This presentation also explores pictures, songs, and other memorabilia that Anokye has collected during her research on these women.
• Host organization provides a screen and speakers.
A Story, A Story: African/African American Oral Tradition and Storytelling
The ability of a person to use verbal performance to achieve recognition within a society is widespread in the African American community. These verbal skills help African Americans learn about life and the world, to achieve group approval, and even to survive. As African slaves were brought to the Caribbean and North and South America, the tradition of oral literature and performance style came with them. African performance styles can now be seen in the narration of myths, folk tales, sermons, jokes, proverbs, and folk sayings; in barbershops and beauty shops and on street corners; in signifying, capping, testifying, toasting, and in the blues, and finally in rapping and hip-hop. This presentation explores the connections between African traditional storytelling and contemporary African American verbal arts.
