Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (review)

The African diaspora is fast becoming a major field of historical inquiry, judging by the number of books with “diaspora” in their titles and the number of scholars who define themselves as specialists. But it is a field still searching for a definition, for an intellectual identity. It is still not clear what gives intellectual coherence to the field other than the fact that the peoples of African descent are the primary subjects. What, for example, distinguishes African diaspora history from African-American history or Jamaican history in methodology and the questions asked?

The volume being reviewed here comprises, with one exception, papers presented at a symposium on the Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora held at Michigan State University in April 1995. The editors organize the eighteen papers into four sections, namely Comparative diaspora historiography, Identity and culture, Domination and resistance, and Geo-social history and the Atlantic world. The papers range from Earl Lewis’ previously published study of African diaspora historiography to discussions of jazz and the Cold War, slaves and the courts in Lima, Africa in a capitalist world, and so on. The volume is not diaspora wide in its coverage since the peoples of African descent in Asia are ignored. In fact, the experiences of African peoples in the Americas constitute the overwhelming majority of the papers and only Allison Blakely raises issues that antedate the Atlantic slave trade in his discussion of the evolution of the European definition of black racial identity. The assumption that the African diaspora and the Atlantic slave trade are synonymous is one that invites scholarly reexamination. There have been, to be sure, several African diasporic streams that occurred at different times and for different reasons.

The value of this collection of papers would have been enhanced by an introduction that attempted to establish a theoretical and historical context for these disparate and chiefly nation specific case studies. Despite the placing of the articles into four discrete sections, each contribution stands on its own and its larger significance is never addressed.

Still, taken together, the papers are balanced and important. Elliott Skinner, for example, underscores the need for scholars to rethink the paradigms that animate the study of peoples of African descent. Thomas Holt reminds us that the “black diaspora enables us to see global connectedness as well as difference and separation” (p. 35) Dwayne Williams cautions against essentializing the experiences of the peoples of African descent and Kim Butler explores the construction of an Afro-Brazilian identity. Barry Gaspar shows how Barbadian slave laws served as a model for Jamaica, South Carolina, and Antigua while Edward Cox compares the transition from slavery to freedom in Grenada and St. Vincent. Frederick Cooper is concerned with the representation of Africa over time, development theories, and international power relations.

Crossing Boundaries deserves a place on the shelves of diaspora scholars although it breaks no new ground conceptually. Its shortcomings reflect the state of the field. African diaspora scholars must cease viewing the history of peoples of African descent solely through the prisms of racism, domination, and resistance. This is an increasingly sterile approach intellectually, one that often obscures more than it reveals about a people’s complex and diverse past. Not all the contributions in this volume deserve this criticism, but the emerging field requires fresh questions and new conceptual frameworks.