African Americans and Africa

Reviewed by: African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden Violet Showers Johnson Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden. African Americans and Africa: A New History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2019. 280 pp. $28.00. In African Americans and Africa: A New History, African diaspora historian Nemata Blyden outlines the complex engagement of African Americans with Africa and Africans. Against the backdrop of landmark historical developments—emigration and "Back to Africa," pan-Africanism, anticolonial movements, the civil rights movement, independence movements, the anti-apartheid movement, the Cold War, and postcolonial transformations in Africa—Blyden explores centuries of the multidimensional ways that US Blacks have viewed and connected with Africa. The span of this book is vast, covering the eighteenth century to the present. Blyden deftly navigates this ambitious chronological expanse by focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on the question "what is Africa to me," she provides rich commentaries about discourses, protagonists, and events that illustrate how enslaved Africans as well as their descendants in the United States expressed their views of affiliation with or detachment from Africa, and developed connections, both real and imagined, to the continent. The book's epilogue ends with this portion of the twenty-first century that summarizes the phenomenal growth of African immigrant populations in America and highlights key themes such as the debate over who is entitled to the label "African American," and the complicated relationships between African Americans and African-born immigrants. Accounts about African American engagement with Africa and Africans are illuminated by the life and work of the people who shaped and pursued understanding [End Page 355] of and links between Africa and Black America. Although Blyden apologizes preemptively for leaving out many historical moments and figures (12), the book is a mine of individuals, events, and discourses that illustrate the complex centuries of engagement of African Americans with Africa. Blyden recounts familiar histories of various waves of emigration to Liberia and elsewhere in Africa, the debates for and against such movements, African American anticolonial efforts on behalf of African colonies, African American support and admiration of evolving African nations, the ambivalent interactions with Africans, mostly students, on American soil, and the inevitable shifts in the dynamics of the relationship between African Blacks and American Blacks that followed independent, emergent African nation-hood. In retelling these diverse stories of engagement, Blyden revisits numerous icons such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Cuffee, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey, to name a few She highlights activist thinkers, including David Walker, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden III, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Eslanda Goode Robeson, and literary figures like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. To create the useful miniature life histories interspersed throughout the book, Blyden uses documents from many primary sources but also relies heavily on a variety of published scholarship. She uses very effectively the works of many of the most renowned scholars of African, African American, and larger African diasporan histories—among them E. Franklin Frazier, George Shepperson, Darlene Clark Hine, Michael Gomez, Leslie Alexander, James Meriweather, Brenda Stevenson, and John Hope Franklin. African Americans and Africa advances new ways of understanding familiar histories of African American engagement with Africa mostly through rediscovering and analyzing neglected or understudied historical participants and crucial aspects of the familiar histories. In retelling the story of resettlement in Liberia, which often spotlights the American Colonization Society and influential families like that of Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Blyden chooses to highlight the story of George Erskine and his family. In focusing on this lesser-known family, Blyden underscores the centrality of women through references to Martha Ann Ricks, George's daughter, and other lesser-known women of the African republic. Positioning women more prominently is a new emphasis that Blyden brings to the scholarship of African American engagement with Africa. For every instance in which she recounts the familiar stories of Black men, she complements these narratives with contemporaneous experiences of Black women. For example, as she notes familiar historical figures such as Alexander Crummell in reexamining the history of African American missionaries in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she also spotlights understudied

Ancient history · Colonialism · Diaspora · Emigration · Ethnology · Genealogy · History of Africa · Immigration · Middle Passage · Out of africa · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History