Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State ed. by Amanda B. Carlson and Robin Poynor (review)

Africa in Florida offers a fresh perspective on U.S. History, American Cultural Studies and scholarship about the African Diaspora. Originally based on a student-curated exhibit at the University of South Florida (2001), the work evolved in response to the erasure of the African and Native American presence in the 2013 celebration of 500 years of Spanish heritage to honor Ponce de Leon’s landing on the Florida coast. The editors of this volume are Africanist art historians who emphasize spatial knowledge and visual images as the lens through which to grapple with established categories of knowledge that tend to separate European, African, and Native American experience while challenging the standard narrative that reduces the story of Africans in Florida to one of slavery in the “deep south.” Accordingly, the contributors offer a “new way of looking” at Florida that goes beyond the nineteenth-century notion of Florida as untouched nature and the twentieth-century notion of Florida as a fantasy world. The editors contend that this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how and why individuals in Florida situate themselves in relation to Africa (as an idea or as place) and the importance of the African influence on personal, local, state, and national histories.

A comprehensive volume that spans from African ethnicities in the colonial era to neo-Yoruba iconography in Florida today, the work is divided into five sections. Part I introduces Africa in Florida by way of geography, an overview of historical themes, and the work of visual artists Adrian Castro and Gordon Bleach who explore what it means to cross the Atlantic and re-imagine home as Africans in Diaspora. Part II, “Seeking Freedom in and out of Florida: Slaves and Maroons,” deals with the problem of slavery and freedom from various perspectives including the relationship between Florida’s maroon communities and Seminole Indians and the migration of free blacks to Veracruz. One essay deals with the porous nature of the Florida-Georgia frontier for fugitive slaves seeking refuge as well as for smugglers and slave catchers engaged in the illegal slave trade. Part III examines the formation of new identities by considering Africanisms in African American cemeteries, cultural survivals in anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on black life, and the legacy of Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi, a female Garveyite. Part IV considers contemporary mechanisms that situate Africa in Florida through streams of Caribbean migration. The authors write about Afro-Cuban art and religion in Miami including the formation of Abakuá communities among Cubans in exile and the artistic tradition of Orisha-inspired Lucumi (Yoruba-Cuban) crown makers. Finally, Part V, entitled “(Re) making Africa in Florida,” explores the work of carver Baba Onabamiero Ogunleye, Orisha veneration in Florida, a sacred “Neo-Yoruba” site near Crescent City, Igbo Masquerades in Florida, and the history of exotic representations of Africa in amusement parks that are critical to the state’s tourism industry.

Africa in Florida is a massive volume that can feel overwhelming in its breadth and in its interdisciplinary perspective. Nevertheless, the editors succeed in creating a work that brings together scholars with artists, poets, and priests. This approach advances a needed dialogue between scholars of the African Diaspora and those who are engaged in cultivating these connections by remembering the relationship of African people to the state’s history and reimagining the inter-relationship between Africans and Floridians. While this work offers an important contribution to our understanding of U.S. history and culture, it is less effective in engaging how continental Africans understand African identities and cultural practices in the state. The essays by Rey on African influence on religion in Miami and Carlson on Igbo masquerades briefly address recent waves of African immigration and its implications for challenging the idea of Africa in Florida. What do Yoruba, Igbo, or Central African immigrants make of...