Theorizing Africa in Black Diaspora Studies: Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River

Abstract

Theorists in cultural studies routinely invoke diaspora as a syncretized configuration of cultural identity: shifting, flexible, and invariably anti-essentialist. This notion pointedly revises an earlier definition of diaspora structured by a teleology of origin, scattering, and return. While these older conceptions of diaspora posited an organic link to Africa, and imagined both symbolic and actual returns to the homeland, the new one focuses on displacement itself, maintaining that the lack of mooring in national or racial certitudes generates anti-essentialist identities. Theorists of diaspora contend that nationalist discourses (such as négritude and Afrocentrism) failed to combat racist binaries of good and evil, black and white—they merely inverted the categories. By placing great value on hybridity, these thinkers often claim that their work transcends such binaries.1 In “Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective,” for instance, Paul Gilroy argues that the “essentially symbolic” value of the term diaspora lies in its emphasis on “the fact that there can be no pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an unsullied originary moment” (309). At the heart of the Black Atlantic, Gilroy argues in a more recent work, is the “desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (Black Atlantic19) in favor of a “more difficult option: the theorization of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity” (2). Gilroy’s definition of the Black Atlantic is thus closely linked to the influential concept of hybridity, as both connote an anti-essentialist, split, or agonistic subjectivity. In his view, hybridity enables cultures to avoid replicating the binary categories of the past and to develop new models of cultural exchange by resisting the notion of pure, homogeneous cultures.