Cultural Revivals

Similar processes of politically motivated cultural revival can be seen at work even in cases where cultural continuity has been violently severed, and collective heritage has been erased by historical traumas such as occupation or slavery. An example of this kind of revival is the race-based solidarity forged by black nationalists in the United States. Recognizing the failure of strategies of racial accommodation and integration in the face of continued structural oppression, black nationalism offered not only a framework for analysis—the black nation was colonized by white America—but a strategy for resistance: collective, anticolonial struggle. Advocates such as Harold Cruse argued in the language of cultural nationalism, claiming that championing an autonomous cultural heritage would not only create unity in a vastly diverse population, but it would also foreground and counter the colonial exploitation and derogation of black culture by whites within the United States, with all its destructive psychological effects, and suggest radical alternatives to liberal accommodationism of civil rights. Movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and pan-Africanism were cultural revivals in that they recognized, celebrated, and discovered cultural continuities with a shared African heritage, fostered invented traditions (such as Kwanzaa), and authorized their ideological claims through reference to this resurgent culture.