Oluwadi About · New Org. · Analysis · Reports · Trends · Blog ·
Oluwadi

Investigating the Overlooked

Region What Who For Analysis
← Analysis Walkabout — wander by real connection, not category
The banjo was never a hillbilly instrument
An instrument built from memory, not brought on a ship -- carried in the heads of enslaved Africans who couldn't bring the object itself, then rebuilt in the Americas from whatever materials were on hand. It became the sound of White Appalachian music not because it started there, but because a minstrel performer learned it from the Black people who built it, and got credited with inventing it instead.
Read this piece →
Where this connects
One tradition, not scattered names — the Black American literary canon, Harlem to now
Most Americans encounter this canon as isolated excerpts, if at all: a poem here, a novel assigned once. It's a single, continuously rebu...
The African version of "birth of civilization"
The standard American classroom runs the origin story one way: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome -- and even Egypt usually gets taught as ...
Start a new walkabout