www.historians.org Open in urlscan Pro
34.204.245.10  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

GET /publications-and-directories/perspectives-search

<form action="/publications-and-directories/perspectives-search" method="get" class="header-search__form">
  <input type="text" name="Keywords" placeholder="Search" class="header-search__input">
  <button type="submit" class="header-search__submit"><img src="/assets/Documents/Prebuilt/icon-search.png" alt="Submit search"></button>
</form>

Text Content

Menu
 * About Expand subnavigation for previous item
   * Staff
   * Submit
   * Advertise
   * Newsletter
 * Research Expand subnavigation for previous item
   * Africa
   * Asia/Pacific
   * Europe
   * Global History
   * Latin America
   * Middle East
   * North America
   * Thematic
   * Digital History
 * Teaching & Learning Expand subnavigation for previous item
   * Teaching Resources & Strategies
   * The History Major
   * K-16 Education
   * Graduate Education
   * Teaching Online
 * Professional Life Expand subnavigation for previous item
   * AHA Activities
   * AHA Leadership
   * Annual Meeting
   * Employment & Careers
   * Professional Resources
   * Grant of the Week
   * Member Spotlight
 * All Topics
 * Magazine Expand subnavigation for previous item
   * Current Issue
   * Past Issues
   * Forums
   * Get Perspectives

Visit AHA
Home> Publications & Directories> Perspectives on History> Issues> September
1998> Viewpoints> Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora

Viewpoints


DEFINING AND STUDYING THE MODERN AFRICAN DIASPORA



Colin Palmer | Sep 1, 1998

The AHA's 1999 annual meeting will have as its theme "Diasporas and Migrations
in History."1 This has been welcomed by those whose scholarly interest and
research focus on what has come to be called the African diaspora. As a field of
study, the African diaspora has gathered momentum in recent times. This is
reflected in the proliferating conferences, courses, PhD programs, faculty
positions, book prizes, and the number of scholars who define themselves as
specialists. But, as far as I know, no one has really attempted a systematic and
comprehensive definition of the term "African diaspora," although the concept
has been around since the 19th century and the term has been used since the
1960s, if not earlier. Does it refer simply to Africans abroad, that is to say
the peoples of African descent who live outside their ancestral continent? Is
Africa a part of the diaspora? Is the term synonymous with what is now being
called the Black Atlantic?

The concept of a diaspora is not confined to the peoples of African descent. For
example, historians are familiar with the migration of Asians that resulted in
the peopling of the Americas. Sometime between 10 and 20 thousand years ago,
these Asian peoples crossed the Bering Strait and settled in North and South
America and the Caribbean islands. The Jewish diaspora, perhaps the most widely
studied, also has very ancient roots, beginning about two thousand years ago.
Starting in the eighth century, Muslim peoples brought their religion and
culture to various parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa, creating communities in
the process. European peoples began their penetration of the African continent
in the 15th century, a process that in time resulted in their dispersal in many
other parts of the world, including the Americas. Obviously, these diasporic
streams, or movements of specific peoples, were not the same in their timing,
impetus, direction, or nature.

The study of the African diaspora, as mentioned at the outset, represents a
growth industry today. But, there is no single diasporic movement or monolithic
diasporic community to be studied. For the limited purposes of this discussion,
I identify five major African diasporic streams that occurred at different times
and for different reasons. The first African diaspora was a consequence of the
great movement within and outside of Africa that began about 100,000 years ago.
This early movement, the contours of which are still quite controversial,
constitutes a necessary starting point for any study of the dispersal and
settlement of African peoples. To study early humankind is, in effect, to study
this diaspora. Some scholars may argue, with considerable merit, that this early
African exodus is so different in character from later movements and settlements
that it should not be seen as constituting a phase of the diasporic process.
This issue ought to be a subject for a healthy and vigorous debate among our
colleagues and students.2

The second major diasporic stream began about 3000 B.C.E. with the movement of
the Bantu-speaking peoples from the region that is now the contemporary nations
of Nigeria and Cameroon to other parts of the African continent and to the
Indian Ocean. The third major stream, which I characterize loosely as a trading
diaspora, involved the movement of traders, merchants, slaves, soldiers, and
others to parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia beginning around the fifth
century B.C.E. Its pace was markedly uneven, and its texture and energy varied.
Thus the brisk slave trade conducted by the Muslims to the Mediterranean and
Middle Eastern countries starting after the seventh century was not a new
development but its scope and intensity were certainly unprecedented. This
prolonged third diasporic stream resulted in the creation of communities of
various sizes composed of peoples of African descent in India, Portugal, Spain,
the Italian city-states, and elsewhere in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia long
before Christopher Columbus undertook his voyages across the Atlantic. In his
important study of blacks in classical antiquity, for example, Frank Snowden
notes that while the "exact number of Ethiopians who entered the Greco-Roman
world as a result of military, diplomatic, and commercial activity is difficult
to determine . . . all the evidence suggests a sizable Ethiopian element,
especially in the population of the Roman world."3 In the parlance of the time,
the term "Ethiopian" was a synonym for black Africans. The aforementioned three
diasporic streams form what I shall call the premodern African diaspora.

The fourth major African diasporic stream, and the one that is most widely
studied today, is associated with the Atlantic trade in African slaves. This
trade, which began in earnest in the 15th century, may have delivered as many as
200,000 Africans to various European societies and 11 to 12 million to the
Americas over time. The fifth major stream began during the 19th century
particularly after slavery's demise in the Americas and continues to our own
times. It is characterized by the movement of Africans and peoples of African
descent among, and their resettlement in, various societies. These latter two
diasporic streams, along with several substreams and the communities that
emerged, constitute the modern African diaspora. Unlike the premodern diaspora,
"racial" oppression and resistance to it are two of its most salient features.

The five major diasporic streams (or four if the first is excluded) that I have
identified do not constitute the only significant movements of peoples of
African descent within or outside of the African continent. Scholars, depending
on their perspectives, should identify other major streams or substreams, such
as that resulting from the desiccation of the Sahara between 2500 B.C.E. and
2300 B.C.E., or the movement of peoples from East Africa to the Middle East and
Asia during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and after. They should make
sure, however, that these streams are not conflated in terms of their timing,
scope, and nature. It should be stressed that it is these diasporic streams--or
movements of specific peoples to several societies--together with the
communities that they constructed, that form a diaspora. The construction of a
diaspora, then, is an organic process involving movement from an ancestral land,
settlement in new lands, and sometimes renewed movement and resettlement
elsewhere. The various stages of this process are interrelated, yet discrete.

Although diasporas involve the movement of a particular people to several places
at once or over time, a migration is usually of a more limited scope and
duration, and essentially is the movement of individuals from one point to
another within a polity or outside of it. The boundaries between the two
processes are, to be sure, very elastic because diasporas are the products of
several migratory streams. Thus, the contemporary movement of Jamaicans to
England is a migration, but it also constitutes a part of the fifth diasporic
stream identified in this essay.

Diasporic communities, generally speaking, possess a number of characteristics.
Regardless of their location, members of a diaspora share an emotional
attachment to their ancestral land, are cognizant of their dispersal and, if
conditions warrant, of their oppression and alienation in the countries in which
they reside. Members of diasporic communities also tend to possess a sense of
"racial," ethnic, or religious identity that transcends geographic boundaries,
to share broad cultural similarities, and sometimes to articulate a desire to
return to their original homeland. No diasporic community manifests all of these
characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered
ancestral kin. In many respects, diasporas are not actual but imaginary and
symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into
being.

It is also useful in this context to remind ourselves that the appellation
"African" was a misnomer until very recent times. Because, generally speaking,
the peoples of Africa traditionally embraced an ethnic identification in
contradistinction to a trans-ethnic, regional, or continentally based one, it is
more historically accurate to speak of Yoruba, Akan, or Malinke diasporas for
much of the period up to the late 19th century or even later. The issue becomes
even more complicated when one recognizes that individuals also moved from one
society in Africa to another for a variety of reasons including being captured
in war. Because an African or transethnic consciousness did not exist, the
people who left their ethnic homeland were, strictly speaking, residing
"abroad." Should such internal movements of specific peoples in Africa be
considered parts of a diasporic stream? Can we speak of an African diaspora
before the late 19th or 20th century since the subjects of our study did not
define themselves as African but as Yoruba, Wolof, Igbo, or other? Equally
important, what demographic, temporal, or other boundaries should be imposed on
the concept?

Clearly, a major problem that scholars of the modern African diaspora confront
is how to make a case for the contours and nature of their subject. This may not
be very easy, as the preceding observations suggest. The difficulty
notwithstanding, I hope to initiate a scholarly debate by attempting a
definition of the modern African diaspora because it is the one that is
currently receiving the most attention. This diaspora possesses some of the
characteristics that I mentioned, but as the following tentative definition
implies, it has its unique features.

The modern African diaspora, at its core, consists of the millions of peoples of
African descent living in various societies who are united by a past based
significantly but not exclusively upon "racial" oppression and the struggles
against it; and who, despite the cultural variations and political and other
divisions among them, share an emotional bond with one another and with their
ancestral continent; and who also, regardless of their location, face broadly
similar problems in constructing and realizing themselves.4

This definition rejects any notion of a sustained desire to emigrate to Africa
by those of its peoples who currently live outside of that continent's
boundaries, although groups such as the Rastafarians sometimes articulate such a
desire. The desire to return to Africa, to be sure, was articulated by many of
the enslaved who were removed from that continent, and thousands of free African
Americans left for Liberia during the 19th century. Men such as Henry Highland
Garnet, Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, and others actively embraced
emigration to Africa at various times but the appeal of the continent as a place
to reestablish roots seems to have waned over time.

Methodologically speaking, the study of the modern African diaspora should, in
my opinion, begin with the study of Africa. The African continent--the ancestral
homeland--must be central to any informed analysis and understanding of the
dispersal of its peoples. Not only must the programs that are designed promote
an understanding of the history and nature of the variegated African cultures,
but it must be recognized that the peoples who left Africa and their ethnic
group, coerced or otherwise, brought their cultures, ideas, and worldviews with
them as well. Africa, in all of its cultural richness and diversity, remained
very much alive in the receiving societies as the various ethnic groups created
new cultures and recreated their old ways as circumstances allowed.
Consequently, the study of the modern African diaspora, particularly the aspect
of it that is associated with the Atlantic slave trade, cannot be justifiably
separated from the study of the home continent.

Scholars must be careful not to homogenize the experiences of the diverse
peoples of the modern diaspora. There are obviously certain commonalities, but
there are fundamental differences born of the societal context, the times, the
political, economic, and "racial" circumstances, and so on. North American
scholars in particular must avoid the temptation to impose paradigms that
reflect their own experiences upon other areas of the diaspora. I am, in effect,
suggesting that we ask different kinds of questions that will more accurately
inform our understanding of the peoples of a diaspora who are simultaneously
similar but yet different. Scholars of the modern diaspora must also make a
methodological distinction between studying the trajectory of a people and the
trajectory of the nation-state in which they reside. In many cases, including
the United States, England, and Canada, the history of marginalized blacks who
occupy a minority status is not coterminous with the history of the
nation-state. The history of black America is certainly not a carbon copy of
that of the larger polity. In the case of those societies in which peoples of
African descent constitute the majority or exercise political and other forms of
power, the issues are more complex. The scholar not only has to examine how a
people realized themselves over time in specific contexts but how they began the
task of constructing nation states as well. Obviously, the histories and
experiences of peoples of African descent in such societies as Jamaica, Haiti,
and Barbados, where they comprise the overwhelming majority, cannot be conflated
with those of their counterparts in England, Germany, Canada, or Mexico, where
they form a distinct minority. The differences are too vast. In societies such
as Brazil and Cuba where the peoples of African descent may be in the majority
but do not exercise political power commensurate with their number, the
questions that are asked must be appropriate to their circumstances. Finally, we
must be careful not to paint a static and ahistorical picture of what was and is
a very dynamic set of processes at work everywhere.

Historians and other scholars should also adopt with the utmost caution the term
"Black Atlantic" (recently popularized by Paul Gilroy) as a synonym for the
modern African diaspora. Not only does this appellation exclude such societies
as those in the Indian Ocean that are not a part of the Atlantic basin, but
there are fundamental differences in the historical experiences of the peoples
of the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic and within those zones as well. If
the appellation Black Atlantic is to be adopted, scholars must resist any
tendency to homogenize and conflate the histories of these variegated peoples
whose memories are still haunted by the ocean that is so associated with the
travail of their ancestors. Not too long ago, some scholars used the term
"Plantation America" to characterize the peoples of African descent in the
Americas, in contrast to those who were called Euro-Americans and
Indo-Americans. Unlike the Caucasians and the Indians, blacks as people were
rendered invisible by this terminology and defined according to a particular
economic arrangement. Although the adjective "Black" suggests that people are
included in the "Black Atlantic" construct, I am still concerned that the term
lends itself to some of the same kinds of criticisms that were leveled at the
use of "Plantation America." In addition, if a general nomenclature is needed
for the peoples of African descent living in the Atlantic basin, it should
emerge from their complex and unique internal experiences, their sinews and deep
structures. Seen in this light, the Atlantic Ocean is of questionable value as
the signifier of a people's trajectory and the core of their history. Similarly,
if a "Black Atlantic" exists, is there an oppositional "White Atlantic," and if
so, what are its animating features? The term "Africology" that is now being
embraced by some to mean the study of the peoples of African descent also
suggests a kind of "racial" or ethnic essentialism that should be questioned.
Obviously, the temptation to reify "race" or ethnicity as the impetus for a
people's motions in a diaspora as opposed to deeper and more universal
structural forces should be avoided.5

The point that I should like to emphasize is that new fields require new
methodologies, and it is unacceptable for scholars to see the modern African
diaspora as a replica of other diasporas or as black American, black British, or
Caribbean history writ large. The field must embrace disciplinary and
interdisciplinary orientations and must, perforce, be comparative in its
methodological dimensions. Scholars, arguably, cannot and should not define
themselves as diaspora specialists if their area of expertise is confined to one
society, or worse, to one small corner of that society. More than anything else,
we need at this stage new and provocative questions that seek to illuminate the
processes at work among the peoples of African descent who are still continuing
to construct themselves and command their destinies. African diaspora studies,
as we shape this developing field, must be subjected to the same kind of
methodological rigor as any other area of knowledge, free from romantic
condescension, essentialism, and distracting fads. For a start, let us see if we
can arrive at a broad agreement on the meaning of the modern African diaspora,
and then we can embrace and promote our diverse interpretive stances.


NOTES

1. I would like to thank the following people who commented on an earlier draft
of this article and helped me to improve it: Michael Gomez, James Sweet, Delia
Mellis, Patrick Manning, Samuel K. Roberts Jr., Risa L. Goluboff, Madeleine
Lopez, Anthony Marsh, Sandra Greene, Regine I. Herberlein, and Joseph Miller.

2. For a discussion of the African origins issue, see Christopher Stringer and
Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1996).

3. Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman
World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 184. See also St. Clair
Drake, Black Folk Here and There, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American
Studies, 1990).

4. This definition owes a great deal to the efforts of my students at the
Graduate School of the City University of New York, who enrolled in my spring
1997 course, "Social Movements in the African Diaspora during the Twentieth
Century."

5. This question was originally raised by Samuel K. Roberts Jr., a graduate
student at Princeton.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Colin A. Palmer is distinguished professor of history at the Graduate School and
University Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is
"Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America," 2 vols. (Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace, 1998).



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tags: Viewpoints Africa Global History

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


COMMENT



Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting.








IN THIS SECTION

 * * About
     * Staff
     * Submit
     * Advertise
     * Newsletter
   * Research
     * Africa
     * Asia/Pacific
     * Europe
     * Global History
     * Latin America
     * Middle East
     * North America
     * Thematic
     * Digital History
   * Teaching & Learning
     * Teaching Resources & Strategies
     * The History Major
     * K-16 Education
     * Graduate Education
     * Teaching Online
   * Professional Life
     * AHA Activities
     * AHA Leadership
     * Annual Meeting
     * Employment & Careers
     * Professional Resources
     * Grant of the Week
     * Member Spotlight
   * All Topics
   * Magazine
     * Current Issue
     * Past Issues
     * Forums
     * Get Perspectives




AHA SITE MAP

About Research Teaching & Learning Professional Life All Topics Magazine Full
Site Map


GET INVOLVED

Why should I join the AHA? How can I support the AHA?




CONTACT

Phone: 202.544.2422
Email: info@historians.org


400 A Street SE
Washington, DC 20003

© 2022 American Historical Association