African Saga

Nina S. de Friedemann

African Saga is a must read book on the African Diaspora in the Americas. Friedemann writes with definitive ethnographic and ethnohistorical detail about the cultural origins in Africa, forced labor in the Americas, and the contemporary role of African descent peoples. Although she wrote seventeen other books, this is her most comprehensive statement about the African experience in Latin America.

Nina S. de Friedemann was one of the creators of the field of Afro-Colombian studies and arguably the most important researcher of her time on the subject. In recognition of her scholarship and writing, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and nominated for the International Gabriela Mistral Prize, established by the Organization of American States.

She was Latin American Coordinator for the UNESCO Project on the Slave Route and worked throughout the Americas and Africa on issues of the African Diaspora. She was founding editor of the journal America Negra and Co-Director of the Program for Afro-Colombian Development. She was a founding member of the Colombian Anthropological Society and President of the National Writers' Guild. Internationally she held positions as Research Associate in social change at Emory University and Visiting Professorships at Georgia State University, University of Alabama, and the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research.

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"Comprehensive review of Afro-Colombian history. At the same time, powerful tool to combat racism due to the way it highlights the contributions made by African captives and their descendants to the building of their nation. A book committed to the future of Africanness in the Americas, due to the political and ethical framework which also guided the life of its author, Nina S. de Friedemann."
-- Jaime Arocha, Professor of Anthropology National University of Colombia Author of Utopia para los excluidos and others

"The late Nina Friedemann introduced a radical but reasonable afrocentrism into the literature on Afro-Colombian people by drawing on her extensive and impressive ethnography synergized with painstaking history, ethnohistory, narrative historicity and even archaeology of Africa and the Americas. Her short work, African Saga,-controversial though it was in Spanish, and controversial though it will be in English - bears testimony not only to her scholarship, but to the endurance and creativity of African-American peoples in lands of violence. Required reading for all students and scholars of the African Diaspora." -- Norman Whitten Professor of Anthropology University of Illinois Author of Black Frontiersmen and others

"Nina S. de Friedemann is an inevitable reference in Afro-Colombian studies." -- Manuel Zapata Olivella Author of Chango, el gran putas and Chambacu, Black Slum among others

ISBN: 9780977751440. 200 pages. Cloth. Retail price $29.95.

ISBN: 9780982065761. 200 pages. Paper.
   (49 black and white photos). Retail price $19.95.

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