The African Diaspora: Using the Multivalent Theory to Understand Slave Autobiographies (original) (raw)

The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery

Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation,, 1997

2000

How do we conceptualise the African diaspora? The forced migration through the slave trade and its impact on the cultures of origin that slaves brought with them to the Americas has constituted an important area of academic research since the pioneering work of Melville Herskovits and Roger Bastide. Prior to their studies, it was assumed that slaves in the Americas quickly lost their own language and cultures whereas Herskovits and Bastide argued that African cultural influences were retained and persisted into the 20th century.(1) In contrast, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976), prioritised the ways in which ethnically fragmented slaves created new creole cultures.(2) Revisiting these debates over African retentions, Ira Berlin and John Thornton argued that slaves were far less heterogeneous than Mintz and Price suggested. Slaves, argues Thornton, came from only three diverse linguistic and cultural areas, Upper Guinea, lower Guinea and Angola and this fostered communication and common cultural understandings and practices amongst slaves.(3) Thus evolved a contentious and ongoing debate regarding the persistence of cultural links between Africa and the Americas to which Identity in the Shadow of Slavery contributes in extending the analysis of diasporic links to include the areas of West Africa that many slaves were drawn from.

African Diaspora Theory: Here, There, and Everywhere

Diasporas and Cultures of Mobilities, Vol 2, , 2015

Although the term African Diaspora seems relatively new, a number of twentieth century scholars utilized a diasporic framework to explain the commonalities among people of African descent around the world. By the twenty-first century, there are suggested rules of usage when engaging the explanatory paradigm. The field of inquiry and the tools of explanation continue to grow and African Diaspora adherents are slowly populating all of the ‘traditional’ disciplines of academe. Today there is a veritable cottage industry of African Diaspora theorists in the academy continually employing concepts and frameworks that add richness to our understanding of black life in different locales. There are even interdisciplinary African Diaspora Studies programs located in several universities. Most of what has been theorized and analyzed utilizes an Afro-Atlantic model as the norm with slavery as the point of trauma and dispersal, although this norm has been expanded to include modern-day African migrations and diasporas including black life via the Indian Ocean. The first task of any narrative analysis is to provide clarity to the concepts employed, and in diaspora scholarship, we must also define the community and individuals under investigation.

The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (review)

Africa Today, 2002

Th e African Diaspora-African Origins and New World Identities is a 566-page book that has been very carefully edited by Professors Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali. A. Mazrui. From it, one very easily learns unambiguously that Africa has made immense contributions to the world at large in varied ways. Such contributions have been done through multiple routes of forced migration as well as the sharing of culture, whose primary and secondary effects cut across the socio-cultural landscape of the Caribbean, Latin America and, evidently, a manifestation in the United States of America. Th e book is very much central to the identity and race discussions in the United States, coupled with a major concern in public policy. In all respects, discussions about African migrations and new identities are always an engagement from three fronts: by Whites, African Americans, whose ancestors suffered the many indignities of slavery and from postslavery restrictions like Black Codes of the post-Emancipation era. Yet, many of these black men and women have persevered to become talented men of letters and professionals, who are still shaping discussions on black identity as well as the third frontier, and also African researchers-cum-scholars, most of whom are teaching in American colleges and universities. Emerging out of a 1996 conference of the same title at the Africana Studies Department of State University of New York (SUNY), these 33 essays by specialists do address such questions as (1) "How did Africans manage to create viable lives for themselves in the New World?"; and (2) "How were they able to negotiate the complex social, political, and cultural spaces they encountered?". In the opening introductory essay, Professor Isidore Okpewho, the distinguished lead Editor of the volume, inter alia, explained the significance of the black presence in general: "What was uniquely American was also the Black presence.. .. the most readily advertised aspect of this presence is the cultural aspect, whereby African Americans have left an enduring mark on American music, speech, literature, food, culture, sports and performing arts." (page XIV). He goes further to write: "Th at, indeed, was the presence that nurtured American capitalism in its infancy, and American democracy in its maturation," (page XIV). Th e implication of this notion was the fact that American capitalism-which currently symbolizes all the theories of free markets from the postulation of Adam Smith through Keynes and Milton Freedman-was because of black labor (or labour), just as the early Civil Rights Movement tested the postulations of Th omas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers of the United States. It is through Professor Okpewho's Introduction that the evolutionary patterns of essays, in four parts start; lucidly presented are "Th e Diaspora: Orientations and Determinations"

Diasporic Hegemonies: Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora

Transforming Anthropology, 2006

"Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogues organized by Deborah A. Thomas and Tina M. Campt as part of a project titled "Diasporic Hegemonies." In this dialogue, Jacqueline Nassy Brown and Bayo Holsey draw from their ethnographic research within Liverpool, England and coastal Ghana respectively to discuss the processes by which and places within which notions of the African diaspora are produced. They also address questions of how particular notions of diaspora are politicized, how they move between and among communities, and how they are used at specific moments in time.

The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery1

Studies in the World History of Slavery Abolition and Emancipation, 1997

Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing the "extensive documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the diaspora," but he lays out a program for future diasporic studies. Prominent in this program are the compilation of biographical data on captives and slaves (including oral source material), the analysis of the sites of the slave trade and movements of Africaderived peoples, the analysis of cultural activities, and an unprecedented form of international, inter institutional cooperation, most notably among African, American, and European institutions which promote education and research. "Il ne servirait a rien non plus de dissimuler nos propres résponsabilités dans les désastres qui se sont abattus ou continuent de s'abattre sur nous. Nos complicités dans la traite [en esclaves] sont bien établies, nos divisions absurdes, nos errements collectifs, l'esclavage comme institution endogene...." Nicéphore Dieudonné Soglo The UNESCO Slave Route Project With these words, the Président de la République du Bénin launched the UNESCO "Slave Route" Project on 1 September 1994 at the old slaving port of Ouidah. 2 To achieve world peace, Soglo continued, it is necessary to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, not only the brutalities of the transAtlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas but also the legacy of the blood-soaked ritual houses in the royal palaces at Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The "Slave Route" began within Africa, and its impact was often severe for both deported Africans and those who remained as slaves in West Africa as well. The pursuit of the "Slave Route" represents a departure in the study of the history of Africa and the African diaspora. Hitherto, Africa and the diaspora have generally been discrete subjects of enquiry. Despite the work of Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide, Melville Herskovits and others, scholars have rarely pursued common links between Africa and the Americas. 3 To address this disjuncture in scholarship is the target of the UNESCO Project, which aims to trace the slave trade from the original points of enslavement in the African interior, through the coastal (and Saharan) entrepots by which slaves were exported from the region, to the societies in the Americas and the Islamic world into which they were imported. 4 The selection of Ouidah as the venue for the announcement of the Slave Route Project was auspicious, since Ouidah had witnessed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 5 The enduring memories of the trade were on display, as a tour of museums in Ouidah, Porto Novo and Abomey revealed. The Porto Novo palace was the venue for a display of contemporary Béninois art, which depicted the tragedies of the slave trade in several mediums. The current depiction of the African past through art stood in sharp contrast to the racism of French society during the late nineteenth century as depicted through posters and advertising from the age of the Scramble; the legacy of slavery and the slave trade were readily apparent. The horrors of slavery emerge in a most grotesque form in the Abomey palace of King Ghezo. The walls of the shrine where thousands of war captives were sacrificed contain the dried blood used to make the bricks. In this setting, the opening words of President Soglo became all the more poignant. As the President proclaimed, "we are all responsible for the slave trade." At the closing of the colloquium, the Minister of Education and Culture disclosed the fact that he is the son of a slave and that he wanted to know about the descendants of his brothers and sisters in the diaspora; the pain of the past era could not have been sharper. With the UNESCO initiative, an effort is being made to bridge that almost unbridgeable gap that separates the academic study of slavery and the slave trade from a full and general appreciation of the heritage of Africa in the diaspora and the modern world. The emphasis on the "slave route" draws attention to the consequences of the trade on Africa and the continuities that rooted the deported slave population in Africa. Some slave descendants and former slaves returned, particularly in the nineteenth century. And there seems always to have been a small movement of individual freemen, especially merchants and their sons, within the diaspora. The settlement of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone and their subsequent dispersal represented one of several patterns of population movement that was a consequence of the slave trade. Besides the slaves taken off slave ships and settled in Sierra Leone, 6 other former slaves returned from Brazil, especially after the suppression of the Male revolt of 1835. 7 A few came from the United States, the Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora, a migration that tended to increase after the emancipation of slaves in the different parts of the Americas. 8 As these demographic patterns suggest, the return of former slaves and their descendants to Africa was one mechanism by which the diaspora influenced West Africa. "African history" not only followed the slave route to the Americas and the Islamic world, but "diaspora history" came back to Africa with the repatriates, thereby complicating the African component in the evolution of the diaspora. The African diaspora came to embrace Africa itself. A revisionist interpretation of the dispersal of enslaved Africans in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade, and by extension to the Islamic world and the Indian Ocean basin, concentrates on the role of Africa in the genesis and ongoing history of the diaspora. This revisionist approach emphasizes the continuities in African history and the extension of that history into the diaspora. The identification of disjunctures in that history is essential, but in contrast to previous interpretations of the diaspora, these disjunctures are analysed in terms of the continuities that have been largely overlooked. There were often

African Diasporas: Toward a Global History

African Studies Review, 2010

This article interrogates the development of African diaspora studies. Based a global research project that seeks to map out the dispersals of African peoples in all the major regions of the world, compare the processes of diasporization, and examine the patterns of diaspora engagements, it offers a vigorous critique of the hegemonous Afro-Atlantic model in African diaspora studies. It focuses on two critical challenges that students of African diasporas must confront: the terms of analysis that are adopted, and the problems of historical mapping. Over the past five years, I have traveled to different parts of the world in search of African diasporas for a project entitled "Africa and Its Diasporas: Dispersals and Linkages," which was generously funded by the Ford Foundation. The project took me to sixteen countries: four in continental South and North America (Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada); four in the Caribbean (Trinidad, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas); four in Europe (Germany, Britain, France, and Spain); and four in Asia (India, Qatar, Dubai, and Oman). This is what I would like to share with you in this presentation: my search for peoples of African descent and their histories, trying to decipher the threads that tie them together and distinguish them from one another.

Historicising the Politics of Slavery and the African Diaspora

2017

African history and historiography have largely accounted for the question of slavery, colonialism, racialism and neo-colonialism. This is because the above phenomena passes as the experiences of the African people which have elicited responses from scholars and researchers of diverse civilizations largely because such phenomena have without doubt, altered the history of the continent of Africa as well as the trajectory and tapestry of the thought pattern of the African person. This paper attempts to historicise the politics of slavery as well as engage in a lucid discourse on the African diaspora which is a resultant effect of the politics that ensured both during the trade and the processes that lead to the abolition of the trade. It engages the expository and analytic methods of philosophical research and argues that the high point of the politics of slavery is evident in the fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade would not have been successful and sustainable as it were if the...

The African Diaspora: Using the Multivalent Theory to Understand Slave Autobiographies (original) (raw)

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