African American Diaspora
The African American Diaspora refers to the dispersion of African-descended people from their ancestral homeland to various parts of the world, particularly the Americas. In literature, this concept is often explored through the themes of identity, cultural heritage, and the impact of displacement on individuals and communities. Writers from the African American Diaspora often use their works to reflect on the experiences and struggles of their people.
8 Key excerpts on "African American Diaspora"
eBook - ePubThe Poetics and Politics of Diaspora
Transatlantic Musings
- Jerome C. Branche(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Introduction Malungaje: Toward a Poetics of Diaspora Over the past few decades, the African diaspora as an aspect of the modern Atlantic has come into its own as an independent unit of analysis for scholars of imperial history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and other related disciplines. In this introduction I revisit the question of the theoretical challenge that the African diaspora represents and consider its applicability to black creative writing and discursive activism in the context of the broader postcolonial and globalized racial regimen. It bears emphasizing that the study of the African diaspora as an academic endeavor, as others have noted, is an inevitably ongoing and unfinished project, on account of its complexity, its political connotations, its geocultural expanse, and its historical depth. One might fruitfully surmise, however, that it is in relation to the modern nation-state (both during and after slavery), that the question of the population of dispersed Africans and their descendants across the geopolitical borders of the modern Atlantic comes into sharpest focus, particularly on account of the recurring phenomenon of the sociopolitical marginalization and economic disadvantage of large sectors of this population in its respective national contexts. This is so especially to the extent that we take into account the conditions of colonial and capitalist production, and the dominance of racial whiteness in the formation of particular states in which Afro-descendants were incorporated, and where they continue to be subordinated, and in the world system at large...
eBook - ePubClose to the Sources
Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy
- Abebe Zegeye, Maurice Vambe(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter Two Notes on Theorising Black Diaspora in Africa Introduction This chapter does not seek to trace and explain the origins and trajectories of the term diaspora. That has been ‘mis-done’ already and we do not want to give prominence to a theoretical malapropism. What we intend doing is to engage one theoretical site where the concept of African diaspora has been elaborated. This is in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah has contributed significantly to the understanding of the politics of change, and the change of politics in Africa, and also in his writings on the African-American people. However, little has been done to critique the theoretical and philosophical foundations that inform Appiah’s important statements on African literature and culture. Existing literature on diaspora written from the West even from its most radical tradition has emphasised diaspora as dispersion. Europeans of Caucasian ancestry do not describe themselves as children of diaspora. Diaspora is marginality. It is the name of a discourse of displacement and political pauperism which, in the experience of Indians and Africans, can be converted into a discourse of resistance. Black diaspora in the new world (America and the Caribbean) is a racial signifier of a disadvantaged people. It traces the road from slavery to social death (Patterson 1994). More than four hundred years of domination of black people by Europeans justifies an exploration of black diaspora from the realm of the victim. However, there is much more to say about movements of political coalescence which defined the historical dimension of the politics of resistance and contradictory agency of black people of African origin that was expressed through nationalism. The tendency to see diaspora as dispersion conjures up the physical movement of people from a perceived margin located in Africa, India and other third world countries towards a perceived centre in Europe and the Americas...
- Martin S. Shanguhyia, Toyin Falola, Martin S. Shanguhyia, Toyin Falola(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Often, those relations have been marked by social distance, and have even been known to be strained. 36 Relevant too is the connection, which again is often difficult, between the new migrants and their respective national homelands. 37 In fine, the African diaspora is diverse, very diverse. So diverse, in fact, that there is a real sense in which one can speak of the African diasporas, in the plural. Even so, the singular (African diaspora) has a certain heuristic value, historical continuity, and political imperative that I wish to maintain for the purposes of this chapter. The African diaspora has never possessed the shared social artifacts around which many diaspora communities traditionally cohere; namely, a common language, religion, or culture, or an actual or imaginary national homeland, as distinct from an entire continent. The African diaspora has always lacked a spatial entity akin to, say, Armenia, Greece, Palestine, or China. It is, and has always been, a genuine Babel, the African diaspora. Yet amid all this multifariousness, a unifying theme, if not a unifying tongue, would emerge. In the form it has come down to us, the story of this unifying theme, this Pan-African concord of modernity, began with the first western African diaspora. It is the story, in other words, of the African diaspora that was called into being in the Americas, largely by plantation crops, which is to say the crops of modernity and some of the key drivers of the Industrial Revolution, chief among them sugar, rice, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and cocoa. 38 Whatever it may have lacked (which was most things, beginning with freedom) the first western African diaspora possessed, and that in abundance, the crucial element in the making of diasporic consciousness: adversity. Above all else, adversity (oppression, exclusion) is the glue of diaspora. It is a sorrow song, the song of diaspora ; at once a popular conveyor of oppression or exclusion and a call to action...
eBook - ePubWriting Intersectional Identities
Keywords for Creative Writers
- Janelle Adsit, Renée M. Byrd(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Diaspora The word “diaspora,” a Greek term meaning “to disperse,” was originally taken up to describe the experience of Jewish people after the Babylonian captivity of 586 bc (OED). A diaspora is a dispersal of people, sometimes violent and forced, but possibly voluntary, from their homeland into new regions. The field of diaspora theory and explorations of diaspora in creative writing have now expanded to encompass many different groups, including the Irish diaspora, Palestinian diaspora, African diaspora, and more. Diaspora theory engages themes of memory, home, trauma, identity, violence, and the “forced scattering” of populations (Sudbury 2004). Theorizing diaspora is central to understanding colonialism. Robin Cohen (2008) argues that diaspora studies has gone through four phases: (1) the classic use of the term to explain the Jewish experience, (2) beginning in the 1980s, the expansion of the use of the concept to describe the experiences of a variety of groups, (3) a wave of social constructionist and postmodernist critique of the concept of diaspora, as articulated previously. These theorists destabilized the notions of homeland and ethnic/religious community, focusing on the complexity of identity, and finally (4) a reconsolidation of the concept of diaspora, incorporating phrase three critiques, characterized by “a requestioning and more sophisticated understanding of shifts in the homeland—diaspora relationship, the ways in which a diaspora is mobilized and how diaspora studies connect to post-colonial studies” (12). As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2013) write, “Colonialism itself was a radically diasporic movement, involving the temporary or permanent dispersion and settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire world” (61). As these settlers established plantations and agricultural colonies, labor was needed to grow food for the metropole. The result of this was systems of enslavement across the Americas...
eBook - ePubGlobal Diasporas
An Introduction
- Robin Cohen(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Deterritorialized diasporas The black Atlantic and other cases DOI: 10.4324/9781003256526-6 Throughout my account, I have suggested that ethnicities have to be considered as multifaceted, historically contingent and, at least partially, socially constructed entities. There also may be wide differences between self-descriptions (the emic dimension) and characterizations by outside observers (the etic dimension). This is true too of homelands or the looser idea of home. As we saw in Chapter 3, for Africans of the first, victim, diaspora, the one arising from transoceanic slavery, home was variously Guinea, Haiti, Freetown, Liberia or the emblematic idea of Ethiopia. Now, ‘new’ African diasporas are more likely to identify with the post-colonial independent states to which they are connected – like Nigeria, Ghana, Somalia or Zimbabwe. Despite acknowledging the many ambiguities surrounding the notions of ethnicity and home, in some cases, we need to slacken these vital moorings of the concept of diaspora even further – seeing both collective identities and homelands/homes as fluid, vibrant and frequently changing sets of cultural interactions. The need to do this arises for four reasons: Patterns of international migration that once would be assumed to be merely unidirectional – ‘migration to’ – are being replaced by asynchronous, transversal, oscillating flows that involve visiting, studying, seasonal work, temporary contracts, tourism and sojourning, rather than whole family migration, permanent settlement and the adoption of exclusive citizenships. 1 Diasporas are often formed not only by one traumatic event (the marker of a victim diaspora), but by many and different causes, several only becoming salient over an extended historical period...
eBook - ePubNarrating African FutureS
In(ter)ventions and Agencies in African and African diasporic fiction
- Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Diaspora dynamics: shaping the future of literature * Noah Sow Diaspora sounds like “a thing, far away from an actual thing.” Yet it is present everywhere and in the future of all things. Diaspora means to have arrived, against all lack of embeddedness, at a mutual, sometimes virtual, place. We have arrived in both belonging and un-belonging. We are family, dancing together over the phone, into our futures. Our European Diasporas are satellite and pseudo-autonomous. In our own unique ways, we are connected to our neighbour continent. We are born, shaped, and surrounded by African influences. Yet, I do not have the authority to define Africa, its past, its present, or its future. I live in one of Germany’s futures, in full approval of the hopeful concept of an inclusionary Diaspora, where we shell out trust and confidence in mutual understanding, learning, and teaching, for a commonly shared future, in our futures yet to come. Only by educating each other do we know about the history of the Black presence in Europe. Our historicity and historiography have always been threatened and sabotaged. To become complete, European historiography is dependent on African memory and framing. Narrating Europe from its future will include perspectives beyond a self-referential European canon and beyond reactivity. It will happen on our account. Juggling multiple consciousness like spheres of code, we do not have to hide any longer. There is a future for everyone, and anyone has their own futures. I see one of our futures in today’s work. Eurocentric narratives did their best to keep us from asking ourselves: What is my own interest? What are my own concerns? What is my own agenda? Still we are compelled to regard all aspects of philosophy, society, even aesthetics from distorted viewing angles. Story after story, text after text has ignored the possibility of us being recipients. It is in the attitude. It is in the language. It is in the authors’ phantasies spattered over the pages...
eBook - ePubBeginning postcolonialism
Second edition
- John McLeod(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Indeed, the slippings between the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘migrant’ and ‘postcolonial’ have been frequent and are not free from problems, as we shall consider. The literature produced by ‘diaspora writers’ – as have been called Monica Ali, Buchi Emecheta, Fred D’Aguiar, Romesh Gunesekera, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith and Benjamin Zephaniah – has proved immensely popular in Western literary criticism. Similarly, in the work of academics such as Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Rey Chow, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and Sudesh Mishra, the new possibilities and problems engendered by the experience of migrancy and diaspora life have been readily explored. These possibilities include creating new and progressive ways of thinking about individual and communal identities and critiquing established schools of critical thought. Such work has often been resourced by critics who turn to issues of migration and diaspora to discover new ways to understand contemporary human existence beyond older, potentially outdated models that stressed the centrality of static ideas of land, belonging, home, nation and the like. But diaspora communities and diasporic thinking are not free from problems, and these days many people who study diasporic thought and culture are wary of its pitfalls, especially in the wake of the popularity of postcolonial accounts of migration and diaspora in the 1990s which often enthusiastically presented diasporic modes of thinking and multicultural communities as making possible the end of imaginative as well as concrete acts of prejudice and division...
eBook - ePubGlobal Diasporas
An Introduction
- Robin Cohen(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This arises first from their common history of forcible dispersion through the slave trade—still shared by virtually all people of African descent, despite their subsequent liberation, settlement and citizenship in the various countries of the New World and beyond. Partly, this is a matter of visibility. Unlike (say) in the cases of Jews or Armenians, where superficial disappearance is possible in Europe and North America if exogamy occurs, in the case of those of African descent skin colour normally remains a marker for two, three or more generations—despite exogamy. The deployment of skin colour in many societies as a signifier of status, power and opportunity, make it impossible for any people of African descent to avoid racial stigmatization. As one black British writer graphically puts it, ‘our imaginations are conditioned by an enduring proximity to regimes of racial terror’. 20 The most intellectually ambitious attempt to define a Caribbean deterritorialized diaspora is made by Paul Gilroy in The black Atlantic. 21 He strongly resists any attempt to hijack the experience of New World Africans to those particular to African—Americans, a tendency he found in some of the ‘Afrocentric’ positions of American black intellectuals. Rather, he sees the consciousness of the African diaspora as being formed in a complex cultural and social intermingling between Africa, Europe and the Americas. However, this does not lead to cultural uniformity, but rather to recognition of ‘transnational and intercultural multiplicity’. Of course, some degree of unity must exist in the Atlantic Africans’ diasporic culture for it to be deemed a shared impulse and form of consciousness. This emergent culture is characterized as ‘the black Atlantic’...
