African and African American Histories in Europe: Joining the Conversation

From the time that Nubian soldiers contributed to the defense of Hadrian’s Wall, one of the Roman Empire’s northern most frontiers, British history has been threaded through with African lives, presences, materials, and objects, as Peter Fryer’s research back in the 1980s first showed us (1–5). Indeed, the threading together and intercalation of Africa and Britain that Fryer exposed may go back even further than the Romans, to when Phoenician and Greek sailors visited the British Isles to trade in tin and circumnavigated the archipelago’s largest island. More broadly, the history of northern Europe is everywhere imprinted with trade-routes and traces of exchange between the sub-continent and other communities, nations, and peoples, both of the south and east, and of the far north. Yet eugenicist and imperial histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often blurred or overwrote these signs for ideological reasons, to shore up racially coded hierarchies.

A Callaloo-sponsored early career day-conference, held in conjunction with Callaloo’s own annual conference in November 2013, took the opportunity of the latter’s transatlantic focus to excavate precisely these buried and suppressed cross-border and intercultural relations. The brief of the scholars, seven of whose papers are collected here, was precisely to investigate what African and African American involvements in European history were, in particular in the two occluded centuries since 1800: What did African cultural contributions in this period entail? What were the roles of African historical actors both major and minor? And, importantly, what archival and inter-textual methodologies are most appropriate to carry out this work of excavation, unraveling, and re-interpretation?

A key feature of the 2013 Callaloo Conference was that it was being held in Europe for the first time, at the University of Oxford. Titled “The Transatlantic, Africa, and Its Diaspora,” the intention was that “conference members and invited speakers will engage each other in discussions dealing with issues in the growing field of transatlantic studies” (Rowell). Crossing the Atlantic, then, was also an intellectual and methodological move. As the journal’s founder and editor, Charles Henry Rowell, explains, “During this period when the transatlantic discourse is rapidly developing, it is very important that . . . Callaloo joins that conversation by staging its 2013 conference at Oxford University” (“Booker and Pulitzer”).

Rowell was right about the rapid development of transatlantic discourse. The field has been transformed since the founding of Callaloo in 1976 as a journal for black writers in the United States South.¹ Indeed, the so-called transnational turn at (roughly) the end of the twentieth century has been the key development in most, if not all, humanities disciplines.² In many ways, of course, black or diasporic studies—unlike many other fields in the humanities—have been transnational from the outset.³ Nevertheless, the transnational and cross-border turn has opened up new ways of exploring how people and ideas, texts and organizations, moved across national borders and, in so doing, recast accepted narratives of control and resistance, identity and culture. Or, as Elleke Boehmer writes in Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, historically anti-colonial and other freedom struggles have gained strength from being articulated “amongst others,” which is to say, collaboratively, across national divides (1–2).

Rowell also explains the significance of the choice of Oxford. In an innocent-enough sounding statement that was duly used in a university press release, Rowell highlighted “the central roles Oxford, as an educational institution, played in the origination and development of the African Diaspora,” (a statement that brought knowing laughter from the conference delegates when read out on the opening evening) (“Booker and Pulitzer”). Coded it may have been, but the point was well made. “Wherever he went in the Empire,” says noted historian Richard Symonds, in his 1991 book Oxford and Empire, “Cecil Rhodes observed [that] he found Oxford men on top.” As Symond’s study further recognizes, under the Vice-Chancellorship of Benjamin Jowett (from 1883), the university at the end of the nineteenth century was developed into a place of...