Resistance, essentialism, and empowerment in black nationalist discourse in the African Diaspora: A comparison of the back to Africa, black power, and rastafari movements

Abstract

The mobilization of ethnicity entails the production of culture—a process involving the interweaving of culture, history and identity, and the manipulation of cultural symbols to reconstruct and reshape conceptions of self and community. The shifting character and salience of ethnicity as demonstrated in the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari movements point to the flexibility of culture and identity. In demonstrating the interrelationships among activism, identity and culture and their impact on the creation of new and revitalized ethno-racial identities in the African-Caribbean Diaspora, all three movements allowed their socially dispossessed and culturally displaced adherents to be active social actors and knowledgeable agents capable of making their own history. This paper takes issue with the black cultural nationalists’ deployment of a “race-culture” essentialist discourse to: (i) frame notions of difference vis-a-vis the Other; and (ii) “imagine” and homogenize blackness so as to produce ethno-racial solidarity in the minds of the disenfranchised.