The Formation of Diaspora, Part 1
Photo by Elizeu Dias on Unsplash. Originally published in AphroChic magazine Issue 1, Winter 2020.
A New Lens for a New World
In 1965, after more than six decades of Pan-Africanism, a new paradigm was emerging, led by a new generation of intellectuals, politicos, and activists. In that moment, the framework that had begun with a brief conference in London, had been formed in the shadow of empires, grew to span nations and, nurtured by many of the best minds of the century, played a key role in reshaping the world, began to end.
Yet the introduction of the African Diaspora concept by Joseph Harris and George Shepperson in 1965 was more than a rhetorical passing of the guard. It signified deep changes in the ways that Black people all over the world were seeing themselves in relationship to their homelands, to Africa as both continent and symbol, and to each other. Bringing all of that into focus would take more than one word.Much more. But before the African Diaspora could become real in the minds of those who would comprise it, it would first have to be formed and defined in ways that would meet the new needs of a changing time. Chief among the questions to be answered between Pan-Africanism and Diaspora was, what’s the difference?
Among the many aspects that differentiate the two frameworks, perhaps the most significant is the basic way in which each conceptualizes the relationship between the individual Black person of any nationality, the continent of Africa, and the whole community of Black people worldwide. Any number of other differences exist, especially as Diaspora continues to work to define itself more fully. But this is most important, because it is on the foundation of these points that both philosophies build the entirety of their perspectives
Form and Function
For Pan-Africanism, the basic foundation of its outlook is expressed in an idea that could loosely be described as “the underlying African self.” This idea posits that beneath the cultural specificities of any nationality or ethnicity, there exists an underlying, original or essential part of every Black person that connects us to the African continent and therefore to each other.
Though the idea of an essential African-ness connecting all Black people might continue to resonate to a greater or lesser degree today, at the time it was all but common knowledge. During Pan-Africanism’s tenure there was no “African-American” as Jesse Jackson would popularize the term in the 1980s, only the African (or more commonly, the Negro) in America. Black people in other parts of the world were thought of similarly, not as belonging to the place, regardless of where they were born, but as being the Negro here or there. The idea is even borne out in the title of Shepperson’s introductory article on Diaspora with its use of the phrase, “The African Abroad”
By necessity, “Africa” played a central role in this conceptualization, which arguably saw what we now think of as distinct Diaspora cultures as different aspects or at least various iterations of a comparatively monolithic African culture. And while it is problematic for us today to reduce Africa to a monolith, ignoring the plethora of cultures that makeup the world’s second largest continent, atthe height of colonialism the only difference between African nations considered meaningful was the flag of the European nation that occupied them.
Whatever anachronisms we might accuse the idea of today, it’s clear that in its time, the underlying African self was not simply a romantic notion, but a philosophical and political tool. It was a refuge for every Black person either disowned by the place of their birth or oppressed in it by the absent monarch of a distant empire. It was the basic building block that made cooperation and joint struggle across oceans possible, allowing the first Pan-African Conference in London to become Pan-African Congresses around the world, and Harlem’s New Negro Movement to become Negritude in Martinique, Senegal, Paris, and more. The composite symbol of Africa that it employed, even if not understood in the moment as being distinct from the actual continent, met the needs of dispersed people, themselves a cultural and genetic composite of many African nations, while drawing their attention and efforts to the aid of a spiritual, if not physical, homeland as deeply in need of them as they were of it.
Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash.
Unity or Difference
As the successful application of the Pan-African framework led to the accomplishment — at least in part — of the purposes for which it had been conceived, the state of affairs within the global Black community began to shift so that the framework itself no longer applied. The introduction of the term ‘diaspora’ by Harris and Shepperson was the beginning of a necessary new direction in thestudy of Black cultures and communities, one that centered on a change in focus from unity to difference as the defining element of relationships between Black cultures internationally. As scholar, Brent Hayes Edwards puts it, “[diaspora] focuses especially on relations of difference and disjuncture in the varied interactions of black internationalist discourses, both in ideological terms and in terms of language difference itself.”
In the years that followed its introduction, the formation of the African Diaspora as a field of study would be significantly aided in the task of theorizing difference by the work of British Cultural Studies, itself an emerging field at that time. In particular, Stuart Hall’s theory of Articulation, a derivative of the Marxist thought of Louis Althusser, would give the African Diaspora the vocabulary with which to address issues of difference. These distinctions had become increasingly prevalent as the Pan-Africanist call for ‘African Unity’ subsided in the face of growing political independence.
Prior to the emergence of the African Diaspora concept, the desire for unity that animated both cultural and political Pan-African movements served to limit not only the study of the various cultural and political elements of the Diaspora, but the confines of Black identity as constructed around the shared image of Africa as homeland. As Hall himself put it:
[S]uch images offer a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all forced diasporas. They do this by representing or figuring Africa as the mother of these different civilizations...Africa is the name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the center of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked...Such texts restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past.
Photo by Brian McMahon` on Unsplash.
Hall’s somewhat pessimistic-sounding take on the role of Africa as the central, unifying concept of all Black identity interprets this idea of a singular, underlying yet shared self as one of two approaches to cultural identity. Within Pan-Africanism, this approach was the primary means of engendering the desire for unity and the sense of shared urgency on which Internationalist movements of every sort depended. Though theorists of subsequent generations, including Hall, would argue against this method of binding and thus, as they assert, limiting Black identity, the necessity of this stance in the time in which it found its greatest use is not difficult to understand. Without a central image of shared concern to bind them, coordinated activist movements among African descendants of many lands would have been nearly impossible to create, much less sustain.
Coming out of this moment however, the establishment of Black Studies as a burgeoning field in the late ’60s and early ’70s shifted the focus from international unity around the symbol of a free African homeland, to a series of competing nationalisms. Within this context it is similarly possible to understand Hall’s push to investigate difference given that, as a British citizen of African descent, he was himself equally marginalized in studies of bothBlack and British culture at that time.
In the U.S., approaches to Black Studies emerging from various Black Nationalist movements, such as Maulana Karenga’s Us Organization tended to privilege the study and culture of African Americans specifically. At the same time, the reification of English particularism within British cultural studies established the subject of that study firmly, if not exclusively, as the white, British, male. Though Hall was a prominent figure in the field and an important voice in such discussions as a founding member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, for countless othersacross the world the combination made it difficult to establish Black identity across, and in some cases, even within national boundaries.
Hall’s work makes a powerful intervention into the theoretical basis from which society is observed with the 1980 essay, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.” Though the term ‘diaspora’ appears nowhere in the text, it is in this essay that Hall most thoroughly lays out the idea of difference in unity as entailed in the Althusserian concept of Articulation. As Hall recountsthe idea:
The term Articulation is a complex one, variously employed and defined...[I]t is a metaphor used to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity between different levels of all sorts of things...[T]hese things require to be linked because, though connected, they are not the same.[Therefore] the unity formed by this combination, or articulation, is always, necessarily a complex structure.
The challenge that Hall continued to take on in his work on cultural identity was to find a means of expressing the connection between Diaspora cultures while affirming their difference — yet without resorting to nationalist or ethnic “essentialisms.” He describes what he affirms as a second approach to cultural identity as one that, “recognizes that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather — since history has intervened — ‘what we have become.’ ”
His recognition of the importance of the intervention of history in the process of creating cultural identity achieves two major goals. First, it dismisses the hegemonic unity of the African center of the global Black culture by acknowledging that the passage of time and the events of history have resulted in the emergence of new cultures within theDiaspora which are African in origin — and then only in part — but not in expression. Secondly, it emphasizes the differences that stand between Diaspora cultures while recognizing the points of similarity that transcend attempts at facile ethnocentrisms. While additional scholars would continue the work of establishing difference as the fundamental element of Diaspora, Hall’s work was a major first step towards an understanding of global Black identity that acknowledged both the connection of community and the distinction of unique cultural and historical trajectories.
The Point of it All
In the first article of this series, we looked at the prevalence of the term diaspora, its attachment to dispersals of all kinds and the tendency for those who study them to try to define diasporas collectively. And we demonstrated several points of distinction between the African and other diasporas in the process of arguing that diasporas in general should be considered individually as each has its own salient characteristics. In the transition away from Pan-Africanism, the global community now collectively understood as theAfrican Diaspora created one of its biggest and most important distinctions, and a massive argument for its continued study as a thing unto itself.
The difference between Pan-Africanism and the African Diaspora as expressed in their most basic, core concepts is profound. Both acknowledge a connection between all Black people and cultures around the world, as well as points of difference that distinguish us one from another. But they differ greatly in their interpretation of this agreement and on which aspect of the relationship is most important. For Pan-Africanism, which espoused an inclusive global perspective, unity was the most important thing as it was crucial to pursuing its agenda of African liberation — a term that extended beyond the continent to include dispersed Black people living in different conditions of oppression around the world. Therefore for Pan-Africanism, the underlying African self was the true self, as it connected us across oceans and inspite of generations of exploitation, abuse and resistance. Conversely, in the absence of an inclusive political or social agenda, Diaspora presents an outlook no less global, but far more specific and decentralized in its treatment ofBlack cultures. For Diaspora, as Stuart Hall clearly stated, it is not the points of commonality but the points of difference that connote,“what we really are.”
For most if not all diasporas, the whole point of being understood as a diaspora is to create or maintain some sense of unity or sameness despite dispersion. And while it is very likely that conversations within any number of diasporas have turned to address present or growing cultural differences within them, it was on this basis specifically that the African Diaspora came into being — not as a way of establishing unity, but as a means of countenancing difference.
Photo by Seth Doyle on Unsplash.
It’s natural at this point to question which of the two approaches is better, as both have clear strengths within their fundamental differences — but there are more useful avenues to pursue. Instead of comparing one framework to another, it is more important to compare each to the times and the needs of the people whose lives are lived in and through a given paradigm. From that perspective, the question is not whether diaspora is in some way superior to Pan-Africanism, or whether it more accurately describes the“reality” of interconnected cultures dispersed and descended from the African continent. The question is whether, as a tool, diaspora does what we need it do now as well or better than Pan-Africanism did what we needed it to do then. Though we may not really have an answer until diaspora has joined Pan-Africanism on the list of zeitgeists past, in the present moment the question is far more valuable. Asking it requires that we take detailed stock of what we think diaspora is in the context of the struggles we face in the world as it is right now, with the intended purpose of matching one to the other. Because if we are not working conscientiously to make diaspora the solution, it could easily become the problem.