Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252077539 ISBN 13: 9780252077531

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Global Circuits of Blackness is a sophisticated analysis of the interlocking diasporic connections between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A diverse and gifted group of scholars delve into the contradictions of diasporic identity by examining at close range the encounters of different forms of blackness converging on the global scene.

 

Contributors examine the many ways blacks have been misrecognized in a variety of contexts. They also explore how, as a direct result of transnational networking and processes of friction, blacks have deployed diasporic consciousness to interpellate forms of white supremacy that have naturalized black inferiority, inhumanity, and abjection. Various essays document the antagonism between African Americans and Africans regarding heritage tourism in West Africa, discuss the interaction between different forms of blackness in Toronto's Caribana Festival, probe the impact of the Civil Rights movement in America on diasporic communities elsewhere, and assess the anxiety about HIV and AIDS within black communities. The volume demonstrates that diaspora is a floating revelation of black consciousness that brings together, in a single space, dimensions of difference in forms and content of representations, practices, and meanings of blackness. Diaspora imposes considerable flexibility in what would otherwise be place-bound fixities.

 

Contributors are Marlon M. Bailey, Jung Ran Forte, Reena N. Goldthree, Percy C. Hintzen, Lyndon Phillip, Andrea Queeley, Jean Muteba Rahier, Stéphane Robolin, and Felipe Smith.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jean Muteba Rahier is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University. He is the coeditor, with Percy C. Hintzen, of Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States. Percy C. Hintzen is a professor of African American Studies and the chair of the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of West Indians in the West: Self Representations in a Migrant Community. Felipe Smith is an associate professor of English at Tulane University and the author of American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance.

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Global Circuits of Blackness

Interrogating the African Diaspora

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07753-1

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................viiIntroduction. Theorizing the African Diaspora: Metaphor, Miscognition, and Self-Recognition Percy C. Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier.....................ix1. The African Diaspora as Imagined Community Felipe Smith..............................................................................................32. The Ecuadorian Victories in the 2006 FIFA World Cup and the Ideological Biology of (Non-) Citizenship Jean Muteba Rahier.............................293. Race and Diasporic Imaginings among West Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area Percy C. Hintzen......................................................494. Continuity, Change, and Authenticity in Toronto's 1990 Caribana Concert Lyndon Phillip...............................................................745. Rethinking the African Diaspora and HIV/AIDS Prevention from the Perspective of Ballroom Culture Marlon M. Bailey....................................966. Remapping South African and African American Cultural Imaginaries Stiphane Robolin...................................................................1277. Amy Jacques Garvey, Theodore Bilbo, and the Paradoxes of Black Nationalism Reena N. Goldthree........................................................1528. Diaspora Homecoming, Vodun Ancestry, and the Ambiguities of Transnational Belongings in the Republic of Benin Jung Ran Forte.........................1749. Somos Negros Finos: Anglophone Caribbean Cultural Citizenship in Revolutionary Cuba Andrea Queeley...................................................201References...............................................................................................................................................223Contributors.............................................................................................................................................255Index....................................................................................................................................................258

Introduction

Theorizing the African Diaspora: Metaphor, Miscognition, and self-recognition

PERCY C. HINTZEN AND JEAN MUTEBA RAHIER

The Work of Diaspora

It is critical for any theorizing and conceptualization of the African diaspora to ask the question: "Why diaspora?" There is much to be gained from an examination of the work the term does and why its currency has grown in the arena of black consciousness and representation. It may well be important, in this regard, to consider "diaspora" as a metaphor or analogy related to what Clifford Geertz has suggested to be the central issue in any discussion of social reality: "How symbols symbolize, how they function to mediate meaning" (1975:208).

Metaphor derives its informative value because, according to Paul Ricoeur summarizing Clifford Geertz, "it says what it wants to say by comparison" to a sign or signification that is already part of the structure of experience and understanding of people's social world (Ricoeur 1986:256). It provides the lenses through which people experience and see reality (Stephan 1990). The use of the expression "African diaspora" as a signification of the black condition emerged during the 1950s in the wake of the Holocaust of World War II. What the Holocaust revealed was the centrality of racial violence to the European modernist project (Mamdani 2005:3-16). Such a realization pervaded European postwar understanding of itself and provoked Aimi Cisaire (1995) to tie the European bourgeoisie's inability to forgive Hitler to "the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa." For Frantz Fanon, "Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony" (1967:75).

What the Holocaust revealed were the consequences of violent abjection carried to its extreme. It became the signifying event for the acknowledgment and acceptance of a Jewish history of rejection, abjection, and exclusion in European popular consciousness. "Diaspora," when transferred as a signification of the black social reality, served as a powerful metaphor to publicize the even more devastating, brutal, and pervasive violence that constituted the common history of colonialism and slavery. It served in scholarship about black social reality to "elevate hitherto unconsciously held analogies into self-conscious theory, to extend the meanings attached to the analogies, to expand their range through new observations and comparisons, and to give them precision through specialized vocabularies and new technologies" (Stephan 1990:42). For black scholarship, it opened up the space for "speaking back" to the objectifying anthropological gaze by turning it upon itself through the lens of the Jewish experience now acknowledged to be the product of European pathology.

It is therefore not surprising that the first iterations of African diaspora scholarship made specific reference to forced exodus. The African diaspora emerged, according to this form of conceptual specification, out of the collective phenomenon of displacement and dispersal (Palmer 2000). Thus, Tiffany Patterson and Robyn Kelly argued that diaspora "served in the scholarly debates both as a political term, with which to emphasize unifying experiences of African peoples dispersed by the slave trade, and also as an analytical term that enabled scholars to talk about black communities across national boundaries" (2000:14). These politics and analytics were present in black scholarship from the inception: the very point of Patterson and Kelly's intervention. However, before "diaspora" (following Jean and John Comaroff's description of the space of liminality that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness), these politics and analytics remained unspecified "in the realm of partial recognition, of inchoate awareness, of ambiguous perception" (1991:29). To a large extent, they remained captive to continental (for example, African), regional (for example, Caribbean), and national (for example, African American) discourse.

We would like to argue that, as metaphor, the political and analytical work performed by diaspora has much to do with issues of recognition and consciousness that we consider to be the central analytics in the scholarly engagement with blackness. Diaspora, in this sense, was a response to what Althusser, engaging the Marxist debate on ideology and distortion, identified as the "miscognition" of the subject (1971:182). Here, we would like to link "miscognition" to "misrecognition" because both relate to ideological distortion. Such distortion, as it pertains to blackness, derives from the ruling ideology of white supremacy that we consider to be the central force in the process of black abjection, exclusion, and erasure. As ideology, it functions in and through an interrelated system of cognitions, actions, and social structures that are the constitutive elements of symbolic action (Winant 2001:317). In other words, diaspora...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252077539
• ISBN 13: 9780252077531
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 261
• Herausgeber: Rahier Jean Muteba, Hintzen Percy C., Smith Felipe
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland