Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: The Challenges of Studying the African Diasporas 1The field of African diaspora studies has grown rapidly in recent years.What accounts for this?What are the current preoccupations of African diaspora studies and their limits?Who dominates the field and how can African scholars help reshape it?These are of course broad and difficult questions which cannot be adequately dealt with in a paper of this size.Suffice it to say answers lie as much in the shifting dynamics of knowledge production as in the changing contours of material production, in transformations that are simultaneously epistemic as they are economic, that are confined to and connect the academy and society, that are often as much national as they are transnational.In short, the rise of African diaspora studies can be attributed to, on the one hand intellectual and ideological imperatives, and on the other to developments in regional and global political economies.Intellectually, the growth of diaspora studies was facilitated from the 1980s by the rise of globalization and transnational studies as well as cultural studies and especially the 'posts' -poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.Also critical was the growth of interest in world history following multiculturalist assaults on the western civilization curriculum.This was accompanied by an explosion of conferences, centres, courses, and publications on diaspora studies.Particularly crucial in the Anglo-American academy was the publication of Paul Gilroy's (1993) influential, but deeply flawed text, Ideologically, the field of African diaspora studies has benefited from the resurgence of Pan-Africanism and black internationalism, the age-old imperative for collective liberation for African peoples at home and abroad, fostered in part by the collapse of the schisms of the Cold War, the demise of apartheid, and the renewed search for anAfrican renaissance.Intellectual and ideological developments of course do not occur in a vacuum.The socioeconomic dynamics underpinning the growth of diaspora studies are varied indeed, but principally include transnational migrations and movements, globalization processes and the reconfiguration of nation states, and the awakened interest by African institutions and national governments in diasporas as a developmental asseta remittance pipeline -and as the continent's potential global guardian.Contemporary African mass migrations within the continent and to other world regions including those containing diaspora communities have reconfigured the identities of African peoples as existing national, racial and ethnic identities are reconsidered, renegotiated and recalibrated.These processes are mediated by the intensified flow of ideologies, images, and identities facilitated by the new information and communication technologies.The growth of African diaspora studies as an academic field has been uneven.It is stronger outside than within the continent itself, and there are of course important variations in each of these locations.This can be attributed to the very demands of the 2The Black Atlantic.diaspora condition, that diasporas are more likely to reflect on their diasporic identities than non-diasporized populations.Also, institutions of higher learning are stronger and far better resourced in the African diaspora hostlands of the global North than in most African countries.Within the diaspora itself, there are notable differences between the Atlantic and non-Atlantic worlds, between North and South America, between the Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone scholarly worlds, and within each of these worlds as is the case between theAmerican and British academies.As many commentators have noted especially those working in the bourgeoning field ofAfrican diasporas inAsia, the field ofAfrican diaspora studies is largely framed by the Atlantic model in which the patterns of dispersal are reduced to the slave trade and the processes of diasporization to racialization (Zeleza 2005;Keita 2005;Campbell 2006;Larson 2007).As for the Americas, outside of the Caribbean and Brazil, race and blackness have not featured as highly in Latin American historiography as they have in US historiography (Vinson 2006).And in the Anglophone world, not only is the field more developed in the United States than in Britain, in the American academy there is the division between ethnic studies and area studies in which African American/Africana/Black studies and African studies are often lodged, respectively, while in the British academy the division is between those in cultural studies and in development studies (Hanchard 2004;Zack-Williams 1995; Zack-Williams and Giles Mohan 2002;Adi 2002).African scholars are clearly late comers to the field of African diaspora studies, and among them migrant academics relocated to the academies of the global North especially the United States, Britain, and France probably predominate.One could argue that besides their exposure to the closer seductions of diaspora studies, many are driven by the diasporic imperative to defend Africa which is routinely defamed in the global North and by autobiographical impulses to make sense of their own transnational experiences and diasporic offspring (Zeleza 2008).I know attempts to understand better my Canadian-born daughter and African-American wife were a major inspiration for me.They and their colleagues and compatriots on the continent are also increasingly attuned to efforts by policy makers to engage African diasporas more productively -theAU has declared the diasporaAfrica's sixth region.As I have argued elsewhere, greater engagement by African scholars in diaspora studies might be critical in shifting the terms of debate in terms of their analytical, linguistic, geographical, and racial referents.Analytically, a continental perspective incorporating North Africa and South Africa helps decentre the 'Black Atlantic' perspective, both in its spatial and racial preoccupations with the Atlantic world and 'blackness' in so far as African scholars from northern Africa and among those of Asian and European descent in South Africa may not be preoccupied with 'blackness', thereby freeing studies and discourses of African diasporas from their racialized trope and trap.Linguistically, the fact thatAfrican scholars are, collectively, multi-lingual in terms of the European languages thanks to the fiat of colonialism, can and should help in the reading and production of diaspora studies and discourses beyond English to include Portuguese, French, and Spanish, among the key languages of the Atlantic diasporas.Africa is also home toArabic and several European andAsian languages that are part of the languages of theAfrican diasporas in the regions that use those languages.
Author: PT Zeleza
Institution: University of Illinois Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2069906048