African Americans in Europe

Abstract

African Americans have an extensive history and continuing presence in Europe. This reflects the artistic, cultural, and intellectual exchanges between the peoples of Europe and the peoples of Africa since antiquity. With the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and founding of the United States, these exchanges with Europe took on a distinct character as African Americans negotiated the racial and imperial complexities of the United States and modern Europe. Over the span of close to two and a half centuries, African Americans engaged Europe culturally, intellectually, and politically in advancing multiple projects for cultural flourishing, political advancement, and establishing new modes of planetary possibility. African Americans saw Europe as both refuge from the vicissitudes of the racialist and racist protocols of the United States and a haven for the exploration of the full depth and possibility of modern humanity. In Europe, African Americans encountered Africans from the continent and from across the African diaspora and forged new cultural, political, and intellectual links that gave rise to new movements and fresh expressions of human possibility and solidarity. African Americans also forged alliances with Europeans in giving rise to a distinctive African American–inflected “Afro-pean” culture. Europe’s response to African American people, culture, and ideas contained a mix of admiration, appreciation, and respect tinged by racial essentialism, racial exoticism, and racial supremacy. African American responses to European people, culture, and ideas ranged from acceptance of dominant European frameworks and categories to position African Americans as human, modern, and civilized to creative creolization of Europe in forging fresh perspectives of African American culture, identity, and history. For African Americans, Europe was not only a geographic place across the Atlantic; it also served as a powerful symbol of a space where the play of ideas and identities offered possibilities not available within the cultural, geopolitical, and intellectual confines of the United States. African Americans used Europe to define and redefine themselves as well as to fashion new dreams and myths of being and belonging in the world. In other words, the Old World of Europe served as a new world of possibility for African Americans who sought to navigate its refined cultures and stately traditions in forging new paths for African American art, culture, and expression. The history and continuing presence of African Americans in Europe represents a significant element in the ongoing exchanges between the diverse peoples and cultures of Africa and Europe for millennia.