On Being and Becoming Black in a Globally Dispersed Diaspora

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the rhetorical strengths and limitations of the Black identity as experienced in varying geographic locations across the globe. I draw from the work of Ruth Simms Hamilton who asked, “[A]re there a broad set of experiences which link diverse communities of the African Diaspora, temporally and spatially?” (“Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” African Presence in the Americas 1995, 393). Hamilton believed the African Diaspora was connected via an “active site of cultural and political action and struggle,” as Black bodies remain racialized in a Western context where “being defined as an inferior race and in racial terms is pertinent to the people formation process” (404). Using the migratory/displacement narratives of the Somali diaspora as an example of a people who were, are, and are still becoming, this essay takes a geographic approach to consider the impacts of place on the Black experience, and to understand the existing nuances and diversity within it. Building on the works of Asante, Dotson, hooks, Kynard, Lorde, Royster, Sharpe, and more, I aim to examine how the Black experience feels and changes within and across geographies, and how this transforms us, “as we make a radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world” (bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 1989, 23). I also hope to contribute nuance in Black rhetorical studies for understanding the broadness, aliveness, and richness of the Black/African diaspora while highlighting the uniformity that can be found in the experience of Black racialization across the globe.