Cultural identity:

Questions: What is cultural identity? How important is it to an individual?

Task: Make a 5-minutes speech on the importance of one's cultural identity, record it and hand in your audio clip. Due: the 2nd Week

Cultural identity: Cultural references through which individuals or groups define and express themselves and by which they wish to be recognized; cultural identity embraces the liberties inherent to human dignity and brings together, in a permanent process, cultural diversity, the particular and the universal, memory and aspiration. UNESCO Declaration of Cultural Rights 1996

Questions: What may cause cultural identity crisis? How do people generally react to it?

Anxiety over cultural identity and cultural heritage:

     1) A West-dominated globalization

     2) Threats to cultural heritage

     3)  Attitudes and strategies: submission, confrontation, dialogue

     4)  The importance of cultural multiplicity

Black Awareness

Questions: What is Black Awareness? Explain briefly how it is awakened  and raised throughout American history.

a)   Slave Trade (slave-master mentality)

b)   Civil War (motives and effects)

c)   Civil Rights Movement and Black Power

       1)  Political struggles: positive discrimination (affirmative action)

       2)  Cultural Awakening: rediscovery of Afro-American heritage; redefining US culture as a whole

      3)   Anti-white extreme tendencies