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The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001) 155-170



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Atlantic Aporias:
Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic

Charles Piot

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In the reconfiguring of area studies and the disciplines that is currently underway in the U.S. academy, the work of Paul Gilroy has become an exemplar of the sort of transnational, interdisciplinary project around which much of the new scholarship is converging. Not only has Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) done much to suggest a new, intercontinental unit of analysis, but it has also helped to establish as generally paradigmatic of cultural process the sort of cultural mixing—creolité/métissage/hybridity—that is characteristic of black Atlantic cultures. One small sign of the enormously influential nature of this work, as well as that of a handful of other Atlantic scholars (Stuart Hall, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kobena Mercer, Joseph Roach), is the recent proliferation of conferences and reading groups focusing on the black Atlantic at universities around the country (many of which are supported by Ford and Mellon money in search of new projects after area studies).

A surprising blind spot in Gilroy’s work, however, as well as in that of many recent scholars of the African diaspora, lies in his treatment [End Page 155] of Africa. In The Black Atlantic, the focus of transatlantic exchange and connection is largely on the Caribbean, the United States, and Britain. Africa bears little more than passing reference, and then, notably, only Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Southern Africa—sites repatriated by freed American slaves and intensively settled by Europeans—are mentioned.1 Similarly, in Hall’s important work on diasporic identity, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Africa figures only as an imagined presence for Afro-Caribbean peoples. 2 This omission not only silences a major entity in the black Atlantic world but also leaves unchallenged the notion that Africa is somehow different—that it remains a site of origin and purity, uncontaminated by those histories of the modern that have lent black Atlantic cultures their distinctive character—and thus risks reinscribing a conception of culture that Gilroy, Hall, and many of the new diaspora scholars otherwise spend much of their work critiquing. This ellipsis also suggests, of course, that Africa has played little role in the development of black Atlantic cultural production, other than as provider of raw materials—bodies and cultural templates/origins—that were then processed or elaborated upon by the improvisational cultures of the Americas. 3

In this essay, I attempt to return Africa to the diaspora. But I aim to do so not by characterizing it, as an earlier diaspora literature long did, as a site of origin and symbolic return but rather by seeing Africa as itself diasporic—as derivative of the Atlantic slave system and made and remade by its encounter with modernity. Imagining the diaspora as prior to the homeland might also enable us to read the black Atlantic and theories of identity developed by diaspora scholars like Gilroy and Hall back into the cultures of the mainland.

In order to make my case, I will examine the history of an area of French West Africa, that of northern Togo, where I have conducted research over the past twenty years. This region would appear to be an ideal place in which to explore the idea that Africa is diaspora-derivative, for not only is its location in the West African savanna remote from city and metropole but also it retains all the visible signs of a seemingly pristine African culture: subsistence farming, gift exchange, straw-roofed houses, rituals to the spirits and ancestors. And yet I want to suggest that this place is better understood as residing within the modern and as shaped—and indeed thoroughly remade—by the slave trade.

I aim also to contribute to a refiguration of my own discipline of Africanist [End Page 156] anthropology. Anthropological depictions of Africa have been widely criticized over the last two decades for the way in which they long constituted their object of study: African societies portrayed...

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