BOOK REVIEW: Kandiatu Kanneh.AFRICAN IDENTITIES: RACE, NATION AND CULTURE IN ETHNOGRAPHY, PAN-AFRICANISM AND BLACK LITERATURES. London: Routledge, 1998.

Abstract

In recent years black Britons, impatient with essentialism and American-centrism of much of US Black Studies, have brought to Black Studies important nuanced arguments that rest on the theories of hybridity, play, and indeterminacy. Unfortunately, the privileging of individual agency tends to overshadow the significance of structural pervasive racism. Moreover, in making transnational observations about black subjectivity, Africa is often overlooked, and an essentially literary methodology is employed—which makes it too easy to create a theoretically interesting argument that is nonetheless ungrounded and/or imprecise because it is based solely on texts stripped of their particular context.