African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden

Abstract

Reviewed by: African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden R. Joseph Parrott African Americans and Africa: A New History. By Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 266. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19866-9.) Africa looms large in the imagination of many black Americans. Yet from 1619 to the present, the ways African diasporic identities have coexisted with American ones have been fluid and contested. Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden's expansive and readable African Americans and Africa: A New History explores the varied ideas, perceptions, and attitudes about Africa that have influenced African Americans and how these concepts shaped "what they called themselves historically" (p. 11). The result is a concise volume that serves as an introduction to the complex history of black identity in the United States and as a survey of the broad scholarship that opens doors for future research. Blyden is an ideal guide for this journey. As the child of an African immigrant and a black American, her family story frames her interrogation of the hyphenated African American identity. Blyden finds, rather than a narrative of rising or declining identification with Africa, that attraction to an oft-idealized ancestral homeland ebbed and flowed in response to domestic race relations. Survival and improvement were the primary goals, with African heritage providing a communal rallying cry. Dreams of returning to an Africa free of prejudice provided refuge during periods of fraught race relations, as evidenced in nineteenth-century colonizationism and Garveyism. Yet as these frequently debated examples demonstrate, rarely did black communities cohere around a single identity or mission. Blyden's strength lies in her ability to capture the diverse ways African Americans sought to "(re)connect with Africa" while negotiating their positions within United States society (p. 81). [End Page 681] This duality shaped African American perceptions of the African continent and its peoples. Enslaved persons adapted inherited traditions, and intellectuals from George Washington Williams to W. E. B. Du Bois drew on black heritage to inspire pride. Nonetheless, African American visions of Africa were filtered through the prism of the white-dominated media. Metropolitan, educated Africans who lived in the United States challenged negative stereotypes of a backward continent but could not overturn them. As a result, uplift and civilization remained components of African American internationalism until decolonization reversed the power dynamics of the black diaspora. Blyden thus highlights ideas of Africa as inspiration for both pride and projects in the United States, while illustrating the discrete cultural perspectives that have historically separated black Americans and Africans. Blyden provides a valuable synthesis using the latest scholarship to expand on her earlier work on transatlantic black identity in the nineteenth century. She is an excellent writer with an eye for the telling story or quotation, making the book ideal for classroom use. Experts on African American engagement with Africa will recognize much of the information, but Blyden does yeoman's work in unifying discrete historiographies to highlight comparisons and lasting trends across five hundred years of history. For example, the "mix of pride and hesitation" produced by African identification within the dominant white American culture becomes a repeating theme, which links the post-Revolution decades of the eighteenth century to the post–civil rights era of the 1970s and 1980s (p. 196). Yet Blyden is careful to avoid emphasizing a singular perspective, capturing both historical and scholarly debates on African American identity. My major critique is that this approach occasionally mentions historical and historiographical contradictions—inconsistent settlement patterns of recent African immigrants or Carol Anderson's reassessment of the NAACP during the Cold War—without exploring them in detail. Blyden could have more effectively intervened in these debates by analyzing or disentangling these seeming dichotomies within the longue durée of transnational identity politics and ambiguous diasporic relations, potentially pushing scholarship in new directions as a result. These quibbles aside, African Americans and Africa is an important book, which provides a much-needed and accessible primer on African American identity in a global context. R. Joseph Parrott Ohio State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association