The Challenges of Studying the African Diasporas

Abstract

The field of African diaspora studies has grown rapidly in recent years. What accounts for this? What are the current preoccupations of African diaspora studies and their limits? Who dominates the field and how can African scholars help reshape it? These are of course broad and difficult questions which cannot be adequately dealt with in a paper of this size. Suffice it to say answers lie as much in the shifting dynamics of knowledge production as in the changing contours of material production, in transformations that are simultaneously epistemic as they are economic, that are confined to and connect the academy and society, that are often as much national as they are transnational. In short, the rise ofAfrican diaspora studies can be attributed to, on the one hand intellectual and ideological imperatives, and on the other to developments in regional and global political economies. Intellectually, the growth of diaspora studies was facilitated from the 1980s by the rise of globalization and transnational studies as well as cultural studies and especially the ‘posts’ – poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.Also critical was the growth of interest in world history following multiculturalist assaults on the western civilization curriculum. This was accompanied by an explosion of conferences, centres, courses, and publications on diaspora studies. Particularly crucial in the Anglo-American academy was the publication of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) influential, but deeply flawed text, Ideologically, the field of African diaspora studies has benefited from the resurgence of Pan-Africanism and black internationalism, the age-old imperative for collective liberation for African peoples at home and abroad, fostered in part by the collapse of the schisms of the Cold War, the demise of apartheid, and the renewed search for anAfrican renaissance. Intellectual and ideological developments of course do not occur in a vacuum. The socioeconomic dynamics underpinning the growth of diaspora studies are varied indeed, but principally include transnational migrations and movements, globalization processes and the reconfiguration of nation states, and the awakened interest by African institutions and national governments in diasporas as a developmental asset – a remittance pipeline – and as the continent’s potential global guardian. Contemporary African mass migrations within the continent and to other world regions including those containing diaspora communities have reconfigured the identities of African peoples as existing national, racial and ethnic identities are reconsidered, renegotiated and recalibrated. These processes are mediated by the intensified flow of ideologies, images, and identities facilitated by the new information and communication technologies. The growth of African diaspora studies as an academic field has been uneven. It is stronger outside than within the continent itself, and there are of course important variations in each of these locations. This can be attributed to the very demands of the 2