Expanding the Channels of the African Diaspora

The importance of the African diaspora has been demonstrated over the last two decades by the publication of works dealing with it as a broad academic concept. Those concerned with the study of Africa as well as the Caribbean, North America, South America, and Europe have been engaged by diaspora conceptions, which allow for a bridging of the boundaries of discreet geographic areas. Four recent publications all demonstrate the vibrancy of critical studies in the field of the African diaspora: Configuring the African World: Essays on Continental and Diasporic Literatures and Cultures, by Femi Ojo-Ade; African Diasporas: Ancestors, Migrations, and Boundaries, edited by Robert Cancel and Winifred Woodhull, that includes selections from the African Literature Association conference in San Diego; The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan Narratives, by Babacar M’Baye; and Literary and Sociopolitical Writings of the Black Diaspora in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by Kersuze Simeon-Jones.

Femi Ojo-Ade’s collection, Configuring the African World: Essays on Continental and Diasporic Literatures and Cultures, brings together a group of his writings, including a number of public lectures. In the initial chapter, “Color and Culture in Literature,” he challenges the notion that “Africa had no culture” and comments on a range of literary figures, such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Claude McKay (6). Ojo-Ade locates diasporic ground and “the common element of autobiography in Black writing,” which includes “Slavery, colonialism, [and] racism” (12). The next chapter, “Africa in Diaspora,” focuses specifically on the Afro-Cuban writings of Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban exile from the 1960s who specialized in Afro-Cuban cultural materials and the influences of Yoruba religion. Ojo-Ade continues the exploration of religion in the third chapter and considers the path to Christian conversion, saying that “hospitality led to spiritual enslavement” and that “the wise African . . . was zealously selling both his soul and his society to this new religion” (55). In chapter 3, “The Church Versus the Shrine: Christianity, Scourge of African Society,” Ojo-Ade also compares the diaspora and Africa and remarks that “continental African” is viewed as retaining a kind of “illusion of authenticity,” but that the “African of the Diaspora,” as a result of enslavement, has been subjected to “white hell” (57). Other approaches to religion appear in the chapter “From Colonialism to Neo-Colonialism: Issues of Culture, Religion, and Language in Africa,” where Ojo-Ade uses Es’kia Mphahlele’s criticism of negritude and anglophone conceptions of “African personality and Pan-Africanism” and considers them as problematic ideologies (189).

Addressing specific writers, a later chapter, “Of Man, Misery, and Marxism,” explores the contribution of Haitian Jacques Roumain, whose work demonstrates that “Literature in Black society has always had a social function” (67). Roumain’s early writings were critical representations of mulatto elites in Haiti, according to Ojo-Ade. In addition to the francophone Caribbean, Ojo-Ade looks at such francophone African works as Ferdinand Oyono’s Une Vie de Boy and its problematic translation as Houseboy by John Reed in the chapter “The Literary Translator, Messenger or Murderer?.” A further discussion, “Buchi Emecheta: Second-Class Citizen, Second Sex, Slave,” includes Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen, which is analyzed in detail, but with some critical judgment on her feminist position. For example, “It is a pity that Emecheta and her Adah fail to realize that colonization has created the new Afrophobic culture which they are now espousing...