Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Producers: Llewellyn Smith, Vincent Brown and Christine Herbes-Sommers. Vital Pictures, California Newsreel (educational distributor), Independent Television Service (Sally Jo Fifer, executive producer). DVD video (closed captioned), 57 minutes, 2009. What is Africa to me? Copper Sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black, Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved. Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? Circa 150 years after Phillis Wheatley penned her famous poem about her "pagan" father land in "On Being brought from Africa to America," the renowned Harlem renaissance poet Countee Cullen expressed a very different positive attitude regarding Africa in his classic poem "Heritage" written in 1925. The difference in the poetic voices and attitudes of Wheatley and Cullen are clearly representative of the ambivalence toward Africa and African cultural heritage which has been characteristic of the Black American psyche for several centuries. The two polar extremes exemplified by Wheatley and Cullen expose periods of shame and contempt about the ancestral homeland as well as times of race pride and positive identification with the mother continent. The root causes and persistence of this ambivalence among African Americans regarding the continent of their origin becomes quite clear when one understands the insidious and dehumanizing aspects of the "Maafa, i.e. The Great Enslavement" and its aftermath, where there were concerted and deliberate attempts through cultural racism and systematic mis-education to convince Blacks that they were biologically and intellectually inferior creatures compared to their Caucasian counterparts. According to Brown University's James T. Campbell in his ground breaking text "Middle Passages; African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005, when an African American asks--what is Africa to me?, he or she is also asking what is America to me? He writes "...most of African American history--and much of the history of the United States as a whole is encompassed by these two intertwined questions." Any serious investigation exploring the depths and profundity of the latter two questions would eventually lead us straight to the pioneering cultural work and extraordinary intellectual life of Melville Jean Herskovits (1895-1963). The phenomenal life, legacy and scholarly career of Professor Herskovits is uniquely explored in the new documentary film release from Vital Pictures. They have teamed up to produce a probing and powerful look into the influential legacy of Herskovits and his over 40 years of rigorous scholarly work and field research to document African cultural survivals/retentions in the Western Hemisphere. Entitled "Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness", the film has already been awarded best new documentary at the Hollywood Black Film Festival. Forty six years after the passing of Professor Herskovits in 1963, he has been rescued and resurrected from obscurity for both present and future generations of students and non-students alike. As a classroom teacher for many years at the college level, I personally recognize and understand the enormous impact a film like this one can potentially have on beginning and advanced students engaged in the fields of Sociology, Anthropology, History and African American Studies. We should also mention the intellectual benefits that this film offers to those individuals who are not presently involved in academia, but are genuinely seeking a greater knowledge base with regard to continental Africa and the Diaspora. Today we have witnessed the far reaching impact and influence of movies and films on a popular audience. Even those who may not be privileged or have direct access to the early literary works of Frantz Boas and Melville J. …