Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Europe and the African Diaspora Mahriana Rofheart (bio) Hine, Darlene Clark, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, eds. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Recently, there have been several publications that re-examine the contemporary or historical contours of diaspora such as Isidore Okpewho’s edited volume The New African Diaspora (2009); Patrick Manning’s The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (2010); and Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (2009) edited by Dawne Y. Curry, Eric D. Duke, and Marshanda A. Smith (part of the same New Black Studies Series as the book being reviewed). Black Europe and the African Diaspora edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small marks its own space among these texts in its constant critical assessment of both public and scholarly notions of blackness, Europe, and diaspora—all three of which are reconsidered in most, if not all, of the volume’s essays. Black Europe and the African Diaspora, which comes out of a 2006 symposium at Northwestern University of the same name, aims to examine migration, blackness, and diaspora beyond geographical and disciplinary boundaries, as articulated in Stephen Small’s introduction (xxiii). Among the essays in the volume’s three broad sections—one focused on history, one on specific European nations, and one on theory and representation—there are indeed a variety of disciplinary perspectives with essays relating to literature, film, political science, anthropology, and history. And while many of the essays examine what it means to be Black in Europe and to be a Black European, the most exciting intervention in the volume comes in the several essays that locate Black Europe beyond Europe as it is commonly understood. But all of the essays in Black Europe and the African Diaspora will prove both useful and unsettling for those who are researching the Black European experience. Section One of the volume, “Historical Dimensions of Blackness in Europe,” is well-structured and diverse. The section begins with Allison Blakely’s country-by-country overview of the history and current status of Africans living in Europe. At times cursory in its approach (focusing heavily on the positions of high-profile Blacks as a measure of [End Page 975] progress), Blakely’s essay nonetheless works well as an introduction to the more specific essays that follow. Dienke Hondius’s essay about a boat of “Moors” that found its way to the Dutch town of Middleburg in 1596 en route to the West Indies demonstrates careful historical research and the necessity for more of the same due to the fact that Blacks in Europe were kept invisible during the slave trade. In “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Josephine Baker’s Films of the 1930s and the Problem of Color,” Eileen Julien examines what two of Baker’s films reveal about French anxieties surrounding race, and Tina M. Campt looks at Black German family photographs that provide clues to gendered and racialized notions of national belonging in Germany before and during World War II. Campt additionally argues for a decentering of the United States in studies of the African Diaspora (64), a position significant to several later essays in the volume. The section concludes with T. Sharpley-Whiting and Tiffany Ruby Patterson’s essay, “The Conundrum of Geography, Europe d’outre mer, and Transcontinental Diasporic Identity,” in which the authors argue that France’s former and current overseas territories be included in explorations of Black Europe. Overall, the volume’s first section demonstrates that it is necessary to examine Black Europe from these unexpected perspectives because of the frequent invisibility of Blacks throughout Europe’s history, pointing also to the near impossibility of coming to a cohesive definition of blackness in the European context. The essays in Section Two, “Race and Blackness in Perspective: France, Germany, and Italy,” provide reflections on the status of contemporary Blacks in Europe. Alessandra Di Maio discusses black writing in Italian since 1990, significant as an essay contribution in part because black migrant writing in Italian remains a fairly unknown field, a fact not lost on Di Maio herself (120). Di Maio’s examination of...