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A Africa and the African Diaspora Invariably, African cultural heritage and African diasporic tendencies have gone through numerous changes. This is especially so since some scholars regard both as part of the Africanisms that one hears a lot about with re­spect to African Amer- ican culture in general and black diasporic cultural heritage in par­tic­u­lar. By intellectual-­cum-­academic implications, Africanism, according to historian Joseph Holloway, is seen as “­those ele­ments of culture found in the New World that are traceable to an African origin.” To some scholars, Africanism has, in fact, been a neglected as well as controversial sphere of intellectual inquiry in the United States since the pioneering research or study of Melville J. Herskovits. AFRICAN CARRYOVERS INTO AMERICAN CULTURE In providing the respective impetus needed to trace or reestablish and point the way ­toward Africa’s diasporic implications in the Amer­i­cas, it has become very impor­tant to recall historical anecdotes, including the ­earlier scholarly debates that ­ were fomented by Melville Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier as scholars, both ­ were established intellectual ­ giants in their respective fields of study and research at Northwestern and Howard Universities, respectively. Herskovits, for example, underscored in his book, The Myth of the Negro Past, that very significant African contributions ­ were known to have been made to several segments of American cul- ture to bring about what we see ­ today as black American, or African American, heritage. On the other hand, Frazier, in his so­cio­log­i­cal studies, opposed such notions, as he felt that African Americans did lose their African heritage during slavery and that African American culture did evolve in­de­pen­dently of any Afri- can cultural or traditional influences. While ­ these debates ­ were ranging, other schol- ars have postulated, with similar rich and very useful research, that what is known as the Atlantic World, which forms part of the black diasporic experiences, started to form in the last half of the fifteenth ­ century. In subsequent years, the fortunes of four continents became intertwined and interdependent, whereby the repercus- sions of the interconnections continue to impact the black diaspora as we know it ­ today, which brought together ele­ments of blackness from Africa, Eu­rope, and the Amer­ i ­ cas. In the black diasporic sense, one is discussing or focusing attention on what has, over the years, been recorded as “African carryovers,” as studied and pop­u­lar­ized in Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, published in 1926 by Newbell Puckett. In his anthropological study, Puckett’s early excursion into ­these African terrains has shown that several Africanisms ­were carried over into southern cultural and