The New African Diaspora

2. Diaspora Dialogues: Engagements between Africa and Its Diasporas

2 DIASPORA DIALOGUES: ENGAGEMENTS BETWEEN AFRICA AND ITS DIASPORAS Paul Tiyambe Zeleza In an essay such as this, it is tempting to start by asking some basic questions, to clear the theoretical underbrush, as it were. What does the term “diaspora” mean? What is the African diaspora? Who qualifies to be considered part of the African diaspora? How have African diasporas been formed and changed over time? How have they produced and reproduced themselves and their identities? How have they engaged Africa? How do the histories of African diasporas affect the way we think about diasporas, theorize diaspora? In this chapter I would like to explore some of these questions, obviously not in any detail given the constraints of space, but rather in offering possible analytical frameworks. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first part seeks to define the meanings of the terms “diaspora” and “Africa(n)” as a prelude to suggesting the simple but critical point that African diasporas in the Atlantic world—certainly in the United States, the primary focus of the chapter— are multilayered, composed of multiple communities, different waves of migration and diasporization. This means that African diasporas are confronted with the challenge of how they relate not only to their hostlands and homelands but also to each other. The second part attempts to outline and explain recent African migration to the U.S., the wellspring of the new diasporas. The third part examines the relations between the historic and contemporary diasporas. The final part offers a possible analytical framework that might be useful in untangling the complex histories and dynamics of engagements between Africa and its diasporas. D E F I N I N G D I A S P O R A A N D A F R I C A As George Shepperson (44) has reminded us, the term “African diaspora” did not emerge until the 1950s and 1960s. None of the major intellectual forerunners of African diaspora studies, from Edward Blyden to W. E. B. 31 32 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza Du Bois to the Negritude writers, used the term. Prior to the fifties and sixties, African peoples were mobilized using other terms, such as “PanAfricanism .” Today, the term “African diaspora” enjoys pride of place in the increasingly crowded pantheon of diaspora studies. Yet, despite the proliferation of the literature, conceptual difficulties remain in defining what we mean by the terms “diaspora” and “African diaspora.” Contemporary theorizations tend to be preoccupied with problematizing the relationship between diaspora and nation and the dualities or multiplicities of diasporic identity or subjectivity, and they are inclined to be condemnatory or celebratory of transnational mobility and hybridity.1 In many cases, the term “diaspora” is used in a fuzzy and uncritical manner in which all manner of movements and migrations between countries and even within countries are gathered to its generous conceptual bosom, and no adequate attention is paid to the historical conditions and experiences that produce diasporic communities and consciousness, or lack thereof. I say “lack thereof” because not all dispersals result in the formation of diasporas. In other words, dispersal does not automatically create a diaspora, and once formed, a diaspora does not live in perpetuity. Some diasporas disappear; some dispersals turn into diasporas long after the original dispersals. “Diaspora,” I would suggest, simultaneously refers to a process, a condition , a space, and a discourse: the continuous processes by which a diaspora is made, unmade, and remade; the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself; the places where it is molded and imagined; and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed. It entails a culture and a consciousness, sometimes diffuse and sometimes concentrated in a “here” separate from a “there,” a “here” that is often characterized by a regime of marginalization and a “there” that is invoked as a rhetoric of self-affirmation, of belonging to “here” differently. The emotional and experiential investment in “here” and “there” and the points in between, indeed in the very configurations and imaginings of “here” and “there” and their complex intersections, obviously changes in response to the shifting materialities, mentalities, and moralities of social existence. Diaspora is simultaneously a state of being and a process of becoming, a kind of voyage that encompasses the possibility of never arriving or returning , a navigation of multiple belongings, of networks of affiliation. W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk talked of the “double consciousness ” of African Americans, the “sense of always...