Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (review)

Eight years after hosting the "Diaspora Paradigms" conference at Michigan State University, Dawne Curry, Eric Duke, and Marshanda Smith—all organizers of the 2001 conference—have selected and published twelve essays that specifically contribute to the growing field of Diaspora Studies. The resulting collection, Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People, is expansive, with essays that "extend" the geography of the African Diaspora as well as the critical paradigms for understanding it. Crucial to the volume's success is its point of view that diaspora itself is an "analytical category" that can help illuminate issues of "race, politics, gender, and nationality among other related topics" (xiv). The collection certainly develops an enhanced notion of diaspora itself, and the individual contributions work towards this goal with careful, precise scholarship.

The volume is divided into four distinct sections that vaguely respond to and extend trends in both traditional and diasporic histories of Black people. Section 1, "Pursuing Freedom," analyzes the possibility—and desirability—of "full freedom" in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Atlantic slave system. These essays engage "freedom" as something other than slavery's antithesis by exposing the limits of liberation and manumission for Africans in the Americas. Rather than focusing on the transatlantic slave trade, these three essays rethink Black labor that has been routinely recognized as free. The contributions of Afua Cooper and John Campbell bring gendered readings of the Diaspora with their focus on labor conditions. Campbell's "How Free is Free?" begins the section by reevaluating manumission as a conservative effort at maintaining plantation society and containing sexuality in the British Caribbean; Cooper's "New Biography of the African Diaspora" reads many of the key tropes in Diaspora Studies through Marie-Joseph Angélique, the slave woman accused of (and executed for) setting the Montréal fire of 1734. The stand-out of the section, though, is Beatriz Mamigonian's "A Harsh and Gloomy Fate," which focuses on "liberated Africans," contrasting the fates of those serving the Brazilian state with others around the world. Mamigonian argues that the category of "liberated African" was "a direct, although unforeseen, consequence of the British abolitionist campaign in the nineteenth century" that ultimately led to the rise of alternative forms of coerced labor during the decline of legal slavery (25). Mamigonian's focus on coerced labor for the state reveals a Brazilian intent to keep liberated Africans from living autonomously or developing more refined skills, and in the process, her essay—as well as this section's other contributions—reveals the limits of diaspora scholarship that solely concentrates on the slave trade.

Section 2, "Diaspora Interactions," makes similar moves by giving texture and nuance to the African Diaspora as a concept, often simply viewed as a "dispersal" of people around the world. The section's three essays all seem to share the call articulated in Micol Seigel's entry "Comparable or Connected?": rather than merely looking at parallel developments throughout the Atlantic world, Diaspora Studies "must incorporate conversations, cooperation, and conflict across imagined communities in far-flung places, for these too are formative" (114). Seigel's essay sees connection between 1920s resistance efforts in the United States and Brazil; Iris Berger's "An African American 'Mother of the Nation'" chronicles the often contradictory legacy of Madie Hall Xuma, an African American who brought lessons of "uplift" to South African women through the formation of Zenzele and YWCA clubs. In "Envisioning an Antislavery War," Stephen G. Hall notes both cooperation and conflict in African America's construction of the Haitian Revolution. While Haiti was often depicted in terms of "the horrors of Saint Domingue," Hall traces African American constructions of the revolution through James McCune Smith, George Vashon, William Wells Brown, and James T. Holly, noting that these men normalized Haiti "in the mainstream of revolutionary discourse" in attempts to inspire an American antislavery war (87). This section's three essays all show such commitment to complex interactions between sites...