African Diasporic Communities Research Articles

The African diasporic community in contemporary Ireland: Intersections of ascriptive and circumstantial identities

African identity has remained a major subject of scholarly debate. Essentialist discourses promote the notion of a unified African identity, whereas historical and situational realities suggest the contrary. This article draws on empirical evidence from a recent doctoral research study to examine the dynamics of African identities in modern-day Ireland. It challenges the essentialist thesis of homogeneity, and argues instead that in the pragmatic context of migration Africans negotiate multidimensional identities and belongings, forced by compelling particularistic experiences and the need to adopt personal strategies for adaptation and inclusion. However, regardless of the tension between personal and collective identities and interests, prospects exist for fellowship within the African immigrant community, based on the sense of common migration from Africa and collective alienation in the host country. These shared characteristics ultimately become a necessary instrument for political and strategic effectiveness in building a viable African political community in Ireland.

US Slavery's Diaspora: Black Atlantic History at the Crossroads of ‘Race’, Enslavement, and Colonisation

During the nineteenth century, migration was a central feature of black life in the USA. The combined forces of ‘local’ slave trading, slaveholder relocation, and colonisation removed African Americans from their homes and further dispersed them throughout the cultural contact zones of the American tropics and Black Atlantic. Insofar as they have been linked to one another, these migrations have been situated as aspects of the African or Black Diasporas, yet the migrants' letters reveal identities secured to US homes and homelands, suggesting that their self-conceptions as Americans, albeit enslaved, formerly enslaved or slave-descended, should qualify or even supersede any description of them as members of the Black or African diasporic communities.

INTRODUCTION: PRINT CULTURES, NATIONALISMS AND PUBLICS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN

ABSTRACTThe emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

Back to Black or Diversity in the Diaspora? Re-imagining Pan-African Christian Identity in the Twenty-First Century

The modern movement of people, goods, services, and ideas around the world has been conceptualized using terms such as transnationalism, globalisation, and diasporas. This article explores the phenomenon of the creation of "new postcolonial African diasporas," in particular, Christian African diasporic communities. The article examines how these "new" faith communities influence our conceptions of Black collective spaces and Black theological traditions. It is argued that whilst there is a pressing need to retain a sense of Black collective identity in the face of global trends that accentuate de-essentialization, there is also a need to recognize that racialized articulations of Black Theology do not fully address or explain the unfolding identities and experiences of postcolonial African Christians in the diaspora. A Pan-African understanding of Christian identity, it is argued, provides a more nuanced way of bringing old and new African diasporic concerns together.

RICE, RESISTANCE, AND FORCED TRANSATLANTIC COMMUNITIES: (RE)ENVISIONING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN LOW COUNTRY GEORGIA, 1750-1800

[T]he Negro business is great object with us, it is to the Trade of this country, as the Soul to the Body, and without it no House can gain proper stability, the planter will as far as in his power sacrifice everything to attain [N]egroes and those who have the disposal of them, will always command their Crops, which is everything to Merchant; the prices with us are tempting to the adventurer, until importation takes place directly from the Coast, many will be sent in from the West Indies ... but this is not the [channel] we would wish to attain them though--tis from the Coast only we wish to receive them. --Joseph Clay, Savannah Merchant. (1) On 27 July 1768 the Georgia Gazette posted an advertisement from John Mullryne for two runaway enslaved Africans, Carolina and John. Both men had run away from the Thunderbolt province in Savannah. Carolina, newly imported African from the Guiney Country, had run away several times before and bore the mark of an old offender. (2) His co-conspirator John, a mulatto who spoke bad French, may have been forced labor immigrant who came to Savannah through the inter-Atlantic trade with the French Caribbean. (3) Both John and Carolina were very keen men whom Mullryne believed could pretend to be free. (4) Georgia's colonial slave codes were the main reasons enslaved Africans and mixed-race people of color would pretend to be free. The colony's 1765 slave code granted several citizenship privileges to immigrating free people of color and provided them measure of independence. The development of statutory restrictions on the free black and mixed race population evolved slowly in the years following the legalization of slavery in Georgia in 1750, but the colony lacked the organization for physically monitoring the increasing number of enslaved Africans. Moreover, Africans and mulattoes who ran away successfully transformed the inland areas of Savannah into havens for fugitives of the slave system. The Gazette's description of these two runaways provides important cultural and ideological insights into African origins and ethnicity, resistance, and freedom in Low Country Georgia. (5) The legalization of slavery in Georgia in 1750 and the concomitant emergence of the transatlantic slave trade shaped the evolution of communities among enslaved Africans and African Americans in the late 18th century. In Low Country Georgia, as well as in other parts of the Diaspora, enslaved Africans perceived themselves as part of cultural community that had distinct ethnic and geographical roots. Randomization was not function of the Middle Passage. Although slave ships traversed the coast of Africa to secure captives, in some instances their cargoes were drawn from only one port. Principal ports included Goree, Bonny, Calabar, Elmina, and those on the Biafaran coast; consequently, the ethnic and cultural composition of captive Africans transported to the Americas reflected great homogeneity. (6) Slave ships bound for Georgia included captive Africans who shared similar linguistic heritage such as the Malinke and Serer who spoke the Mande language. To large extent, the transatlantic Middle Passage defined and shaped the New World consciousness of captive Africans and informed their perceptions of kinship, ethnicity, and community. Unfortunately, given this context, the voices of captive Africans have been difficult to hear. (7) With but few exceptions, their words and thoughts are absent from extant archival records. However, commercial and business records on the transatlantic slave trade to Georgia reveal the geographical dimensions of the trade, and the ethnic groups dispersed throughout the region. We also learn much about the various forms of resistance recorded in these materials, thus providing an important historical frame of reference for hearing the voices of enslaved Africans. (8) Physical and cultural resistance to enslavement became an integral element in the formation of African diasporic communities. …

DJ Spooky and the Politics of Afro-Postmodernism

In 2006, the Savoy record label opened its back catalogue of classic recordings from the bebop era to selected hip hop DJs, turntablists, producers, and remix artists. The result was Re-Bop: The Savoy Remixes, another addition to the growing body of jazz remix records that includes, among others, Bird Up, the Verve Remixed series, and Madlib's invasion of Blue Note records titled Shades of Blue. Among the thirteen tracks on Re-Bop are pieces by Duke Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, and Red Norvo, reworked by the likes of Jazzy Jeff, King Britt, and Logic. Charlie Parker's KoKo is also included on the disc, remixed by Paul D. Miller, better known as Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Recorded in November 1945, Parker's KoKo is based on the chord changes of Cherokee, a jazz standard written by Ray Noble in 1938 and made famous by Charlie Barnet's 1939 hit recording of the tune. KoKo can be thought of as an abstracted version of Cherokee in which the sixty-four bar harmonic form of the original is transformed through chord augmentations and an intricate melody played by Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie at an extremely fast tempo. With DJ Spooky's Ali Baba & 50 Thieves Mix of Koko, Miller continues the process of sonic abstraction, combining looped fragments of Parker's recording with hip hopinspired drum beats and sampled voiceovers from various sources. It is significant that Miller chose to remix this particular recording. One of Parker's earliest recorded masterpieces, Koko is a landmark work in the history and development of Afro-modernism. The concept of Afro-modernism differentiates between modes of cultural production in the world and Eurocentric conceptions of modernism/ modernity that reinforce social and aesthetic binaries associated with high and low cultures. I use the term Afrological in the sense outlined by musician and theorist George Lewis, who compares Afrological models of musical improvisation with Eurological trends. These terms, he writes, metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior which ... exemplify particular kinds of musical 'logic.' At the same time, these terms are intended to historicize the particularity of perspective characteristic of two systems that have evolved in such divergent cultural environments (1996, 93). Like Lewis, I use the term Afrological to refer to emergent rather than ethnically essential systems of musical logic that have developed in African diasporic communities historically (93). By extension, the concept of Afro-modernsim provides a theoretical framework for examining the complex relationships between modes of discourse and modernism/modernity. Guthrie Ramsey Jr. explains that for African Americans, Afro-modernism consisted of the creation and, certainly, the reception (the political and pleasurable uses) of musical expressions that articulated attitudes about their place in the modern world. Thus, Afro-modernism asks: What was modernity to African Americans at the historical moment under consideration? How were their attitudes about it worked out artistically and critically? (2003, 97). Ramsey discusses migration, integration, social and economic progress, and urbanization as processes of modernization that contributed to the emergence (or at least the coming to fruition) of the Afro-modernist impulse in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. He also suggests that the musical, socioeconomic, and political developments in midcentury African-American culture constituted an Afro-modernism that not only indexed the moment but extended into future decades (xii). In the present context, I would like to examine some of the ways in which Spooky's work across a variety of media bears the influence of Afro-modernism, articulating a form of that is both poetic and political. My use of the neologism Afro-postmodernism in this context warrants examination. …

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame , and: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (review)

Reviewed by: African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, and: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech Furukawa Tetsushi Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston: Beacon, 2005. 304 pp. $26.00 cloth/$16.00 paper. Shane White and Graham White. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon, 2005. 264 pp. $17.00. The Atlantic slave trade has been studied for many years. We have had seminal works from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896) to Philip Curtain's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), and these classics have been augmented by recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Anne C. Bailey's African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame has joined this long line of research lists as a pathbreaking attempt. There is a "deafening silence" on the issue of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade among African or African diasporic communities. Born and growing up in Jamaica, Bailey herself experienced this silence, and she tried to examine and break through it. "What is behind this silence?" she asks (10). The question brought her deep into an unknown aspect of studies on the slave trade. Unlike many previous works on the slave trade based on European and American records, Bailey's study focuses on the perspectives of the Africans or African societies from which slaves were taken. The book's main setting is the Anlo-Ewe community in the area of southeastern Ghana, once called the old Slave Coast. After years of research, including many interviews with chiefs and elders in Ghana, Bailey tries to untie entangled threads of history concerning slavery in the region. Not only European and American agencies but also African agencies are discussed in the system of the Atlantic slave trade. Domestic slavery in Africa, having existed long before its Atlantic counterpart, is also discussed in the book. Memory of domestic slavery and the history of the involvement of some Africans in the sale of others in the slave trade are shown as some reasons for the silence on slavery. Yet, through studying oral histories such as the incident at Atorkor, involving the kidnapping of famous local drummers and traders by Europeans and Americans in or around 1856, Bailey argues, "[T]o see Africans as partners implies equal terms and equal influence on the global and intercontinental processes of the trade. This was simply not the case. Africans had great influence on the processes of enslavement on the continent itself, but they had no direct influence on the engines behind the trade in the capital firms, the shipping and insurance companies of Europe and America, or on the plantation system in the Americas" (62). Not only was equal partnership between the two groups impossible, but Bailey also finds that even partial African involvement in the trade had devastated their society nevertheless. In some of her accounts, I see somewhat problematic issues such as the simple comparison between the author's oral collection of the Atlantic slave trade and survivors' voices of either the Holocaust or the Soviet Gulag. This needs a more [End Page 195] sensitive and careful argument with a sustained political, cultural, and psychological examination. Despite these drawbacks, the author successfully combines oral and written sources, and historical and literary approaches to unveil the aspect of silence of the Atlantic slave trade. Vivid voices and images of slavery or slave traffic in the region can surely be heard and seen. In this book Bailey goes beyond the simple writing of the past. In the final chapter she deals with the current issue of reparations. Recognizing roles of Africans as well as Europeans and Americans in the slave trade, Bailey remarks, "An apology from African nations and even specific groups whose involvement is on the record would go a long way toward establishing a high moral ground upon which to ask likewise for apologies from Europe and America as well...

The Declining Appeal of Diasporic Connections: African American Organising for South Africa, Haiti and Rwanda*

Throughout the 20th century, African Americans challenged US foreign policies towards Africa and the Caribbean. In the first half of the century diasporic connections, particularly shared oppression and ancestral ties, triggered responses. When the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), an informal organisation of African American congressional representatives, became the key architects of African American foreign policy in the early 1970s, civil rights tactics were wedded to diasporic appeals to motivate African Americans to help shift US foreign policy towards South Africa and Haiti. Diasporic ties, however, worked against a campaign on behalf of Rwanda. This article argues that black globality, a broader framework that encompasses diasporic connections as only one of many possible ties between African Americans and Africa and African diasporic communities, will better serve the CBC in its goal to move African Americans to act on foreign policy issues concerning Africa and African diasporic communities in the 21st century.

Conjuring with Coca and the INCA: The Andeanization of Lima’s Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression. In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces. These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

Translating Narratives of Masculinity Across Borders: A Jamaican: Case Study

For African diasporic communities dispersed across the Americas and Europe, geopolitical alienation and historical marginalization have together precipitated the angstridden desire for reconnection to a site of origin that can seemingly anchor and offer sustaining alternatives to devalorized constructions of blackness. For Caribbean immigrant communities, Stuart Hall's twice diasporized (6), the crisis of may be even more severe. After struggling through histories of brutal political and cultural (re)negotiation with Africa, India and Europe to finally name the Caribbean as home, Caribbean identities are again disrupted by journeys into North American and European metropoles, themselves identified as sites of racial and cultural antagonism. As a result, for African Caribbean immigrants, the Caribbean often comes to replace Africa as the source of a resisting counter-narrative that can challenge the construction of blackness as lack and absence confronted in these metropolitan centers. promise of return and the assumption of the rooted nation/region encoded in the concept of the diaspora become prioritized. problems inherent in the concepts of home and nation, however, complicate both the desire to return and the possibility of (re)belonging. Despite some of the obvious problems in Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000), he does offer some useful ways of thinking about the diaspora that are relevant to this discussion. Gilroy argues that while converging around a shared based on cultural and national particularities may sometimes offer a potent political and moral language (14), that narrative of liberation can also run the risk of reconstituting itself as another type of hegemonic discourse: an unchallenged collective that demands complete obedience to its internal laws and rituals. As a result, . . . ceases to be an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction. It becomes instead a thing to be possessed and displayed. It is a silent sign that closes down the possibility of communication across the gulf between one heavily defended island of particularity and its equally well-fortified neighbors, between one national encampment and others. (103) In this desire for cultural purity, difference corrupts and compromises identity (105). It is precisely, however, in the acknowledgement of difference-the half-different and the partially familiar-that Gilroy envisages the greatest potential for political intervention and change (106). cultural corruption and the disruption of the nation that result from migration and border trespassing can allow us to articulate new understandings of self. Understood in this way, it is the concept of the diaspora-deterritorialized and ambivalentand not the concept of the nation-fixed and uncompromising-that offers possibility for meaningful transformation. diaspora, then, can be seen as opening up rather than closing down communication in the way that it facilitates dialogue across and within nation states. As Gilroy is careful to caution, however, when the diaspora talks back to a nation state, it often initiates conflict (126). The half-different and the partially familiar too often remind the nation of its own troubled identity. Self-consciously positioning myself in this paper as a Jamaican immigrant resident in Toronto, Canada, I indeed want to commence a critical discourse from the diaspora with the nation state, fully aware that the act of talking back, of back chatting, may indeed initiate conflict, yet also holds the potential for healing. A current perceived crisis of gun violence in Toronto's black communities has led to an increasing criminalization and marginalization of black men and Jamaicans, in particular. Jamaican men have come to represent for many white, as well as middle-class black Canadians, a deep fear of black masculinity-the kind of masculinity that has to be kept in check and guarded lest it upset the delicate balance of this liberal democratic state. …

Conjuring the Coca and the Inca: The Andeanization of Lima's Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression. In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces. These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

Horace Campbell. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press/Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 2003. vi + 312 pp. Maps. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper.

Horace Campbell. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press/Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 2003. vi + 312 pp. Maps. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. - Volume 48 Issue 3

Aids, race and the limits of science

In the US, HIV is understood as the virus that causes AIDS, the root of a disease syndrome perceived to indicate an immune system that has ceased to function. These understandings reflect the unquestioned hegemony of Euro/American scientific knowledge, a hegemony that precludes alternative interpretations of life and death, health and disease. This paper argues that HIV/AIDS is more complicated than biomedicine allows, and that the “overmedicalization” of treatment and prevention efforts obscures the significant socio-cultural and political-economic realities that shape the global pandemic, including conceptions of race. The paper specifically focuses on the discourses of bio- and socio-pathology that link African diasporic communities around the globe, and which often seamlessly articulate with structural locations, producing a coherent narrative in which social and moral positions justify and substantiate one another. The analysis here occurs on both these levels: the discursive and the structural. If we are to understand the complex relationships that form the AIDS epidemic, the disciplinary lines imagined between scientific paradigms and the clinical focus on the individual body on one hand, and the social sciences and humanities disciplines on the other, must be breached. If what we call AIDS is a socio-cultural and political-economic phenomenon with biological manifestations, then it is essential that the insights of the social sciences and humanities be brought to bear on finding solutions to the epidemic.

Routings: "Race," African Diasporas, and Swedish Belonging

This paper discusses the fissures and disjunctions in calls for African diasporic community in Stockholm, Sweden and shows how the "local" (which in this case is formulated as national) is tinged with a particular Swedish moral discourse in relationship to racism. A disjuncture expresses itself in stories of the national past and people. This is a past described as homogeneous and which strategically "routes" racism to specific transnational spaces and time periods that are outside of the Swedish community. Following the work of anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown (1998,2000), I suggest that such "routings" push us to consider the specific manners in which "the global" is used to negotiate "local" power relations. The relevance of "routings" emerges in two manners in this paper: in how informants' narratives of the Swedish past are used strategically to comment upon and debate the historically tabooed topic of racism in Sweden, and in how a variety of African diasporic meanings get created and negotiated by Swedes of African ancestry when they discuss belonging and racism.

Bioarchaeology of the African Diaspora in the Americas: Its Origins and Scope

▪ Abstract The results of over 70 years of African Diasporic bioarchaeology are discussed and explained as emerging from distinct interests and traditions of African Diasporan studies, sociocultural anthropology, history, physical anthropology, and archaeology, in that chronological order. Physical anthropology is the core discipline of African-American bioarchaeology, yet it has been the least informed by cultural and historical literatures. Forensic approaches to bioarchaeology construct a past that fails to be either cultural or historical, while biocultural approaches are emerging that construct a more human history of African Diasporic communities. The involvement of African Americans, both as clients and as sources of scholarship, has begun to transform bioarchaeology as in the example of the New York African Burial Ground. The social history of the field examined here emphasizes the scholarship of diasporans themselves, and critiques a bioarchaeology that, until recently, has had little relevance to the people whose history bioarchaeologists construct.

What You See Isn't Always What You Get

Representations of slaves in films appeared in American movies from the beginning of the century. Within the cinematic discourse of slavery, I decided to concentrate exclusively on representations of slaves and people of colour in Hollywood cinema, beginning with W.H. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which represents for many one of the peaks of stereotypical depictions of slaves and African Americans in cinema. It is also important to discuss representations of slaves in non-Hollywood films, however, this area has not been researched to the extent as to which slavery representations in Hollywood have been researched. In this paper I will address three films coming from a counter-Hollywood stance, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005), Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), all deal with the topic of slavery and have slave characters. The two European films, Manderlay and Cobra Verde are criticized many times for their racist and stereotypical depictions of slaves and slavery, and both films have been accused of disregarding the feelings of the African Diasporic communities and the Ghanaian community (in Cobra Verde).