Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T01:41:11.546Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Unfinished Migrations”: Commentary and Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Brent Hayes Edwards ,
Cheryl Johnson-Odim ,
Agustin Laó-Montes ,
Michael O. West ,
Tiffany Ruby Patterson  and
Robin D. G. Kelley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

With “Unfinished Migrations,” Patterson and Kelley have provided an indispensable overview of the recent resurgence of African diaspora scholarship. Describing this “rebirth” in light of contemporary concerns with globalization and transnationalism, they usefully update the work of scholars such as St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and George Shepperson, who over the past thirty-five years have provided similar catalogues and calls.

Rather than contest any particular element of their overview, I will focus briefly on what I consider to be some crucial issues of epistemological strategy raised by their salutary attempt to conceptualize a “theoretical framework… that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis.” The first is that we need to consider in more detail the genealogy of the term diaspora itself. Patterson and Kelley are correct to note that “attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself,” but surely it is also significant that the term diaspora has been appropriated so recently in black intellectual discourse. Writers and activists including Equiano, Blyden, Delany, Du Bois, and Nardal proposed varying visions of internationalism over the past two centuries, but only in the past three decades have black intellectuals turned to an explicit discourse of an “African diaspora.” It seems to me that we need to be able to explain why this term arises, as Patterson and Kelley point out, only in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Type
Special Issue on the Diaspora
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 43 , Issue 1: Africa's Diaspora: A Special Issue , April 2000 , pp. 47 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Locksley, Edmondson,. 1986. “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora: Some International Implications.” In Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Sheffer, Gabriel. London: Croon Helm, 164–211.Google Scholar
Paul, Gilroy,. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Michael, Hanchard,. 1999. “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora.” Public Culture 11: 245–68.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G., 1996. “The World the Diaspora Made: C. L. R. James and die Politics of History.” In Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Farred. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 103–30.Google Scholar
Neil, Lazarus,. 1995. “Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?” Diaspora 4: 323–39.Google Scholar
Earl, Lewis,. 1995. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” American Historical Review 100: 765–87.Google Scholar
Colin, Palmer,. 1998. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora.” Perspectives 36 (6): 21–25.Google Scholar
David, Scott,. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
George, Shepperson,. 1968. “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora.” In Emerging Themes of African History, ed. Ranger, T. O.. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 152–76.Google Scholar
Khachig, Tölölyan,. 1996. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.” Diaspora 5: 3–36.Google Scholar
Ifi, Amadiume,. 1997. Reinventing Africa : Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. New York: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Filomina Chioma, Steady,. 1981. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman.Google Scholar
Enrique, Dussel,. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Fernando, Ortiz,. [1947] 1995. Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Anibal, Quijano,. 1993. “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad.” Peru Indigena 23 (29): 11–20.Google Scholar
Anibal, Quijano, and Wallerstein, I. M. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System.” International Social Science Journal 44 (134): 549–57.Google Scholar
Mary Louise, Pratt. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Michel, Rolph-Trouillot. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
St. Clair, Drake. 1987. Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1939. Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: H. Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Gerald, Horne. 1999. “Looking Forward/Looking Backward: The Black Constituency for Africa, Past & Present.” The Black Scholar 29 (1): 30–33.Google Scholar
Martin, William G., and West, Michael O., eds. 1999. Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G., And Esch, Betsy. 1999. “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Liberation.” Souls 4: 6–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G., And Esch, Betsy. 2000. “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History's Global Vision.” Journal of American History (winter).Google Scholar
Lewis, Earl. 1995. “‘To Turn as on a Pivot’: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” American Historical Review 100 (3): 765–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcolonality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, Michael. 1996. “Crossing Boundaries: Research Notes on South Asians and Africans in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.” Comparative Studies in South Asian, Africa, and the Middle East 16: 48–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar