African Diaspora

The African diaspora is a term that refers to the dispersal of African peoples to form a distinct, transnational community. It is most often used to refer to Africans and their descendants living outside the continent, but diasporas have formed within Africa as well. At its simplest, the word diaspora is defined as a dispersion of a people from their original homeland. The term derives from the Greek verb diaspeirein meaning "to scatter" (Tölöyan, p. 9), and it is expressed in English in other words with the spr root, such as "spore," "disperse," and "sperm." Until relatively recently, the term was most closely associated with the dispersion of Jewish peoples, although there are also extensive bodies of literature about the Armenian, Greek, and African diasporas. The term African diaspora was first adopted by scholars in the mid-twentieth century, but the concept of a global community of African descendants may be traced back much further.

It can be argued that all of humanity may be considered part of the African diaspora, based on the archaeological evidence that humankind originated in East Africa, subsequently migrating to other regions of the world. However, the use of diaspora as an interpretive concept requires greater specificity about what types of migrations are diasporas. As the field of diaspora studies developed in the late twentieth century, scholars began to identify certain features that distinguish diasporas from other types of migrations.

First, diaspora refers to a dispersion of people from a homeland to multiple destinations. This reflects the scattering implicit in the word itself, and it creates conditions under which different segments of the diaspora can create relationships among themselves.

Second, diasporas are connected in some form to an actual or imagined homeland. Each segment of the diaspora shares a common bond with the homeland, the place from which they all originated. This makes diasporas different from nomadic groups without a fixed homeland. The reason that some homelands exist only in the imagination is that the process of diasporization—the departure of large segments of the population—is often the result of traumatic political or economic situations that sometimes destroy the homeland.

Third, diasporas have self-awareness of the group's identity. Diasporic communities are consciously part of an ethno-national group—a "nation" of people defined by a collective ethnic, or group, identity. This shared identity binds the dispersed peoples not only to the homeland, but to each other. Especially in the cases of diasporas for whom the homeland no longer exists, or those who have been separated from the homeland for many generations, this identity has been pivotal to their existence and survival as a cultural unit. Further, the internal networks between the various segments of a diaspora are a unique feature that differentiates them from other types of migrations.

A fourth distinguishing feature of diaspora is its existence over two or more generations. A group meeting all of the above criteria, but able to return within a single generation, may be more appropriately described as temporary exiles. (Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau also included the criterion of time in their definition of diaspora.)

There are many migrations that may be classified as diasporas in African history, beginning with the spread of early humans from eastern Africa to populate the rest of the world. From around 3000 bce, Bantu-speaking peoples moved from the region that is now modern Nigeria and Cameroon to other parts of the African continent and to the Indian Ocean. From the fifth century bce onward, as societies and commerce became more complex, African

traders, merchants, slaves, soldiers, and others began circulating around parts of the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. This movement led to a significant African presence in Europe during the height of the Greco-Roman empires, and to the establishment of North African empires that extended northwards into modern Spain and Portugal (the Moors).

The modern African diaspora arose from three great historical traumas and their aftermaths: the Atlantic slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade, and European colonization on the African continent. The Atlantic slave trade was directly responsible for removing upwards of ten million people from the continent over four centuries, destroying whole nations in the process and enslaving the descendants of the original captives. The violent nature of both the dispersal and subsequent captivity created a distinct Afro-Atlantic diaspora history and culture (which is the focus of this encyclopedia). A much older commercial network trading in slaves across the Indian Ocean dates back to the first or second century ce. This trade was responsible for African relocations within the continent, to India, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, and probably as far as China. European military and commercial involvement in Africa culminated in colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and subsequent migrations of Africans between the continent and colonial capitals led to the creation of many diasporic communities in Europe. While each of these branches of the modern African diaspora has unique characteristics, the entire diaspora has at times been mobilized around such issues as African independence, the struggle against apartheid, or the politics of race, particularly in world capitals where members of all branches reside. Since lived experience and scholarship tends to revolve around communities of shared history, "the" African diaspora is a universe comprised of many constellations.

The African diaspora in the Americas is concentrated in the Caribbean and Brazil, where colonial economies relied on enslaved Africans to produce such export commodities as sugar, tobacco, and coffee. However, Africans and their descendants were integral to all aspects of American life, thought, and culture throughout the entire hemisphere. Africans participated in the conquest of the Americas, and they fought in the trenches to win its independence. They contributed to American architecture, technological innovation, the arts, and more, yet the societies arising on the pillars of slavery were predicated on inequality and exploitation. Thus, after the abolition of slavery, a host of Africans and their descendants migrated to pursue better living and economic conditions, resulting in additional scattering throughout the Americas as well as to Europe and continental Africa.

The literature on the African diaspora dates back to before the term entered the academic canon. As with all scholarship, it reflects contemporary concerns at the time each work was written. In the nineteenth century, international matters, such as relations with Haiti, missionary work and repatriation to Africa, and the implications of African colonization deeply concerned African Americans in the United States. Moreover, the continued racial exploitation and escalating violence around the turn of the twentieth century contributed to a sense of racial solidarity among all African peoples. Yet in the Americas, declaring such kinship with Africans was still a delicate matter. Because the full rights of citizenship were denied to most blacks in the Americas on the pretense that Africans were genetically inferior, there was both a distancing and an embrace of continental connections at this time. The work of George Washington Williams (1849–1891) in the 1880s took on the myth of Africa's limited contributions to civilization and knowledge, anticipating much subsequent research documenting the transformative influence of African peoples and philosophy throughout the world, as well as the extent to which global cultures are, to varying degrees, themselves of African origin.

The partitioning and colonization of Africa, followed by World War I, marked the beginning of a new era of global political consciousness within the African diaspora. This period gave rise to political endeavors such as the Pan–African Congresses, diaspora organizations such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), periodicals such as the African Times and Orient Review and the Journal of Negro History, and artistic and cultural movements including the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude. The scholarship of the early twentieth century documented and analyzed the multiple interconnections that constituted the changing African diaspora, as evidenced in the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. These scholars, along with significant contributions from such figures as C. L. R. James and Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago, simultaneously addressed the politics behind not only the contemporary diaspora, but its very foundations.

Also in the early twentieth century, the new discipline of anthropology was beginning to challenge the tenets of genetic inequality through culture study. Though much of the early work grappled with the "Negro problem"—the implications of having significant citizens of African descent particularly in the emerging nations of the Americas—the resulting comparative ethnographies helped chart the cultural terrain of the African diaspora. The anthropologists Melville Herskovits and Roger Bastide greatly influenced this early generation of culture scholars, and pioneers such as the writer Zora Neale Hurston and the dancers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus innovated methods of interpreting the new research through the arts.

Despite the extent of early scholarship, scholars did not begin to characterize their work as "diaspora" until the mid-twentieth century. The term had particular resonance in the United States during an era of black nationalism and increasing disillusionment about the failure of the nation to fulfill its commitment to its black citizens. The first widely cited use of the term was a paper and panel on "The African Abroad, or the African Diaspora," presented at a meeting of the International Congress of African Historians in 1965. An emerging field of African diaspora studies took root in newly created black studies programs, and other academic disciplines began to consider the African experience. The First African Diaspora Studies Institute convened an international group of scholars at Howard University in 1979, followed by a host of conferences, research projects, and academic programs, not only at American universities but around the world.

Today, scholarship on the African diaspora focuses on the ways in which individuals and communities experience the diaspora, as well as the social processes that create and sustain diaspora communities. Recent research has allowed for focus on the many diasporas contained within the larger diaspora, such as dispersals from individual nations or regions. An example of this would be the Caribbean diaspora, with communities throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America. As a component of black studies, it affords scholars an analytical tool to examine how transnational communities form, operate, and interact within the global African experience. It also allows for better understanding of specific branches of the diaspora through comparison with other branches of the African diaspora and with other diasporas as well.

See also Afrocentrism; Black Studies; Slave Trade

Bibliography

Butler, Kim D. "Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse." Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–219.

Chaliand, Gérard, and Jean-Pierre Rageau. The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Harris, Joseph E. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993.

Harris, Joseph E., Alusine Jalloh, and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds. The African Diaspora. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1996.

Jayasura, Shihan de S., and Richard Pankhurst, eds. The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton, N.J.: Africa New World Press, 2003.

Okpewho, Isidore, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui, eds. The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Tölöyan, Khachig. "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment." Diaspora 5, no. 1 (1996): 3–36.

Walker, Sheila, ed. African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

kim d. butler (2005)