Tempering Race and Nation: Recent Debates in Diaspora Identity

It is not culture which binds the peoples who are of partially African origin now scattered throughout the world, but an identity of passions. We share a hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire, and we are bound by our common suffering more than by our pigmentation.

Ralph Ellison, "Some Questions and Some Answers" (Shadow and Act 263)

Ralph Ellison's position is a simultaneous reaction to defensive affirmations of race in diaspora communities, and to the European and American racist discourses that originally called them forth and continue to operate in the oppression of African and African-American peoples. His move is admirable, insofar as his statement implies the necessity to move out of that discourse entirely and onto a more explicitly political ground that would find motivation in opposing common suffering. The terms of his statement, however, have an ambiguous relationship to his implied aim, and seriously question the possibility of paring identity to aspects entirely accessible to political reflection.

That Ellison chooses to describe an "identity of passions" and a "hatred" might be problematic in suggesting a basis in structures of feeling that are not difficult to assimilate to an idea of culture. At any rate, his choice suggests something deeper than thought. It also conveys a systematic rather than individual experience, an experience possibly protracted enough to have had culturally formative effects. "Alienation" also performs an ambiguous role. Were Africans alienated from a single culture that is now lost? Were they alienated from differing cultures through similar processes? Is it possible to alienate a group of people so thoroughly from a culture that there are no common survivals? Would such a tremendous common experience of alienation have effects that might contribute to new cultural formations? Do Africans have a common culture to recover? Lastly, what does the designation "of partially African origin" suggest about the extent to which peoples of the diaspora are caught up in local cultures in ways that might have begun to form compensatory identities in the face of alienation? What is it that compels them to continue investing their passions in their loss?

By focusing on Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture and Molefi Kete Asante's The Afrocentric Idea, we can begin to examine the aforementioned ambiguities as they play out in two very different assessments of the current needs for African and African-American identity formation. Despite their differences, both make claims for the possibility of a nearly complete freedom from those ambiguities in a thorough awareness of the salient elements of identity. We can also see how the historical development of black utopian projects complicates or confirms Ellison's claims. It is my contention that Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness can offer us a thoroughly contemporary account that may end up being at odds with Ellison's explicit claims while providing a framework for understanding the countervailing forces sedimented in his terms.

Appiah takes a very pragmatic approach to the contemporary problems of African identity. He would agree with Ellison's first statement, saying, "Whatever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual vocabulary" (Appiah 26). But he would take issue with the alternative formulation of an "identity of passions." Appiah speaks of "seeing the world as a network of points of affinity" (viii), an experience of multiple identities that will differ, at least slightly, for every individual. Given such a network, it becomes less likely that an identity will be shared across an entire group the more its members' circumstances diverge. And should it turn out that such an identity were common across the diaspora, he may wish to criticize the reasons behind its operability:

[I]dentities are complex and multiple and grow out of a history of changing responses...