Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema

1. Africa and the Middle Passage: Recoupment of Origin in Sankofa

One of the most powerful metaphors of the black diaspora is that of the Middle Passage, a phrase coined to describe “the portage from Africa to the New World” on slave ships that signified the enslavement of Africans in the Americas (Wolff 1996, 24). As a milestone in black consciousness, the multiple histories of slavery have a powerful grip on both black and Western cultures, marking a schism based on race that still exists in contemporary times. The Middle Passage itself is emblematic of profound alienation because slaves, stripped of human status and valued in monetary terms as livestock, were managed with the sole purpose of ensuring maximum profitability to the white slave traders and the investors in their cargoes or trading companies (24). The journey thus serves to mark the transition between the Africans as human subjects and their transformation into commodity. Imported from the mid-fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century in order to sustain labor-intensive plantation systems stretching across South America, the Caribbean, and North America, these African slaves laid the foundation for many contemporary black communities and movements that shaped the world politically, culturally, and economically (Thompson 1987, 1). Thus, the role played by the Middle Passage and one Africa and the Middle Passage Recoupment of Origin in Sankofa Recoupment of Origin in Sankofa 17 slavery in delineating black experience is crucial to understanding black diasporic identity strategies. Slavery and its legacies are highly contested, due in part to the unevenness of the historical record and the prevalence of historical imperatives that advanced Eurocentric concerns. As a focus of debate, the latter is of critical importance to black diasporic discourses as the need to reconfigure such imperatives is foundational to reclaiming a past that rendered black peoples as objects rather than subjects of the very histories they profoundly shaped. Paul Gilroy argues that in order to redress the one-sided Eurocentric view of modernity, it is vital to reconfigure this history from the perspective of the slaves. Gilroy views this move as not simply intended to reveal how plantations were built on the uneven power dynamics of economic models fundamentally reliant on oppression but, rather, to challenge the monolithic, universalist structure of that history which denies polyphonic slave cultures the right to voice their own histories (1993a, 55). Given this context, this chapter, in concert with others that follow, begins an exploration of several theoretical, historical, and filmic constructs of slavery offering a variety of strategies that decenter Western histories and precepts. Unlike subsequent chapters, which explore specific maps and histories of slavery, this chapter focuses on a broader context of slavery as a global and black diasporic phenomenon. Slavery was a key component of what has been sometimes referred to as the Triangle Trade, composed of the movement of goods to Africa , slaves to the New World, and goods from the New World to Europe . From the 1440s to 1500, the primary destination for African slaves was Europe (Klein 1978, 4). Although the New World attracted many European settlers, however, they did not immigrate in large enough numbers to support the labor needs of mining or plantation agriculture (3). By 1650, with local aboriginal slave populations decimated by epidemics of European diseases, the high demand for plantation workers created by such labor-intensive crops as cotton, indigo, tobacco, rice, coffee, and—most desirable of all—sugar, resulted in the New World becoming the slave trade’s lucrative focus (5, 9). Africans, with their adaptability and resistance to European diseases, became the laborers of choice.1 chapter 1 18 The role of Africa itself in the promulgation of slavery is a contentious one, primarily because slavery was an established facet of many African cultures. Slavery in Africa, however, differed greatly from the type of slavery that emerged in the New World. For example, Claire Robertson points out that slavery in an African context was malleable, ranging from chattel slavery to kin-based slavery, pawnship, and clientage (1996, 6–7).2 Furthermore, African forms of slavery differed from the large-scale slavery in the Americas because even the most extreme forms of chattel slavery, usually referred to as “Islamic or market-based” slavery, offered the possibility of manumission to many of the enslaved (6). Thus, unlike New World slavery, in which slave status was passed on from parent to child, multigenerational slavery was uncommon in Africa (6). Whatever the differences, the presence...