The African Diaspora

Editors’ hopes notwithstanding, collections of essays do not always come together well. Lead editor Isidore Okpewho clearly lays out the intellectual concerns that motivated the conference from which this book resulted: “to explore whatever wisdom may be garnered from” the “scholarly debate between those who affirm the centrality of Africa in the identity and outlook of Blacks in Western society and those who seriously question the validity of the effort” (p. xi). He thus juxtaposes Afrocentricity (such as that advocated by Molefi Asante) with the approach articulated by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in their classic The Birth of African-American Culture (1992) that focused on social and cultural processes in an American world relatively cut off from Africa. Okpewho ultimately seeks a middle ground in the debate, writing that “a good deal of [the] energy employed in arguing for African origins could be usefully channeled into highlighting and celebrating the sheer creativity with which the Blacks of the New World have triumphed over determined efforts to erase their racial memories and create a viable existence for themselves” (p. xix), but he ends with a sympathetic nod to Afrocentricity: “Little is gained by the determined assault on ideologies that seek to protect a race’s sense of self” (p. xxv).Unfortunately, many of the 33 contributors do not return explicitly to these important questions. The chapters range widely; readers who work through the book from beginning to end will have to orient themselves as they leap disciplinary boundaries, space, and time. They also vary greatly in quality. To be sure, there are common themes. Essay after essay documents the constraints under which Africans and their descendants live and have lived in the Americas, but the dominant theme is one of resourceful and creative responses to these constraints, resourcefulness and creativity that did not always have evident ties to African culture. In Muncie, Indiana, for example, blacks achieved homeownership at rates comparable to those of whites, according to Jack S. Blocker’s analysis of the 1920 census. Relatively few of the contributors—save a significant cohort of literary scholars— adopt explicitly Afrocentrist approaches and most of them are, to use Robert Elliot Fox’s terminology, “diasporacentrists” (p. 368).Readers of this journal will find the attention given to Latin America insufficient. Only one essay is devoted entirely to Brazil (despite the fact that it contains by far the largest African diaspora in the Americas); two others use Brazilian evi dence in a comparison. Eliana Guerreiro Ramos Bennett reminds us that Jorge Amado’s “Gabriela” (the title character of Gabriela, cravo e canela [1958]) is a stereotyped figure of the sexualized mulata. Célia M. Azevedo presents a brief summary of her book comparing the abolition movements in Brazil and the United States, offering an effective explanation for their very different approaches—North American abolitionists (mostly Northerners) were working against an alien slave power in the South, while Brazilian abolitionists campaigned from within a society dominated by slave owners. Niyi Afolabi compares Ralph Ellison and João da Cruz e Souza.Eight other essays deal with Latin America or the Caribbean. Kimberly Welch competently surveys the politics of race in Cuba during the period surrounding the repression of the Partido Independiente de Color (1912), but the other article on Cuba, Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s study of music in the emergence of Afro-Cuban culture during the first half of the twentieth century, is superficial. It does not deal with the broader social, political, and cultural issues raised by the adoption of African-derived rhythms and sounds as central elements in Cuban identity. Other chapters do, however, deal with these matters, notably Sandra L. Richards’s contribution on nineteenth-century Jamaican Jonkonnu, which recognizes the celebration’s “polyvocality and contingency of meanings” (p. 267) for blacks and whites alike. The most explicit argument against Afrocentricity comes in Jean Rahier’s essay on the decimas of Afro-Ecuadorians, a poetic tradition today characteristically “African-American” but whose origins lie in sixteenth-century Spain. Sally Price writes sensitively about the changing artistic styles of Saramaka women, and Richard Price eloquently discusses the changes in Martinican identity during the rapid “modernization” of the last few decades. LeGrace Benson writes about African persistence in Haitian art, while Keith Q. Warner surveys the early fascination with cinema in the English Caribbean and the subsequent struggles of local filmmakers to tell their own stories.A few other essays may interest Latin Americanists. Joseph E. Inikori summarizes the historiography on slavery in Africa and argues that what nineteenth-century abolitionists saw as slavery (and European powers used as a justification for imperialism) was in fact more akin to serfdom such as it existed in medieval England or nineteenth-century Russia, than to the labor regime that prevailed on sugar, cotton, or coffee plantations in the Americas. In an inadequately documented chapter, coeditor Ali A. Mazrui writes about the impact of Islam in the African diaspora, making claims for the discovery of the Americas by Islamic Africans in 1312 but not dealing with much better documented periods such as Islam in nineteenth-century Brazil. Laura J. Pires-Hester traces the development of what she calls a “bilateral diasporan identity” (p. 485) among the Cape Verdean immigrants in the northeastern United States.A short review cannot do justice to a book of this scale. Specialists will certainly find much useful material in these chapters, but the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Latin Americanists may learn a great deal about the concerns of North American scholars of the African diaspora from this book, but it is not as effective as it might have been in incorporating scholarship and perspectives on Spanish and Portuguese America

Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Discipline · Environmental ethics · Identity (music) · Ideology · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Social science · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

• Entries

  Open Access•Harry Liebersohn, Martin Klimke et al.•Palgrave Dictionary of…•2009

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• Raising Champions, Taking Territories

  Open Access•Afe Adogame•African Diaspora and the Study of…•2007

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• The Sixth Zone

  Open Access•Rita Kiki Edozie•Journal of African American Studies•2011

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• Pariah Status, Identity, and Creativity in Babylon

  Janet L Decosmo•Identity•2002

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• The Varied Colors of Slave Heritage in West Africa

  Open Access•Victor B Teye, Dallen J Timothy•Space and Culture•2004

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