Racial Politics and Cultural Identity in Trinidad's Carnival

Abstract

The tendency to essentialization is common in so-called diaspora studies and their explicit acceptance of primordially based identity politics. In this critique of the volume edited by Smart and Nehusi (2000), we focus on the authors' references to Africa and Africans, and on their uncritical use of such notions as community, race, and ethnicity. The authors speak ideologically to what supposedly binds the community together; for example, common blood lines, common ethnocultural experience, common col-lective memory, common African origins, and so on. We say supposedly, for much of this idea of community cohesiveness is rather mythical or fictional. It is part of the essentialization and homogenization of Africa and Africans, and in the process, such studies do not highlight those social and structural features that divide the community. This is a common theme in diaspora studies that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, serves to legitimate the illegitimate concept of race.