African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures (review)

African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures, by Kandiatu Kanneh. London: Routledge, 1998. xii + 204 pp. ISBN 0-415-16445-1 paper.

In recent years black Britons, impatient with essentialism and American-centrism of much of US Black Studies, have brought to Black Studies important nuanced arguments that rest on the theories of hybridity, play, and indeterminacy. Unfortunately, the privileging of individual agency tends to overshadow the significance of structural pervasive racism. Moreover, in making transnational observations about black subjectivity, Africa is often overlooked, and an essentially literary methodology is employed—which makes it too easy to create a theoretically interesting argument that is nonetheless ungrounded and/or imprecise because it is based solely on texts stripped of their particular context.

African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures by Kandiatu Kanneh is clearly part of the new Black Cultural Studies, but the book's concern with Africa and African-born intellectuals makes it a welcome addition to black world/Black Atlantic scholarship. Kanneh answers the question "What does it mean to be black in the twentieth century?" by devoting much attention to the construction of "Africa." She argues that black identity is ensnared in the discursive formation "Africa," and this "Africa," a product of ethnography, literature, pan-Africanism, and history, has become vital to our performance of blackness and whiteness on the continent and in the West. True to her mentor, Homi Bhabha, Kanneh views identity as a "panic," a dynamic unfolding process rather than a fixed, culturally discrete endpoint (150). Kanneh, however, goes beyond Bhabha to suggest this panic happens in the context of a powerful "white gaze" that black people have themselves internalized—struggle though they may.

Reading black writers from the diaspora and Africa against influential novels, ethnographies, and quasi-scientific narratives by nonblacks, Kanneh highlights striking continuities in the construction Africa even as authors have conflicting intents. For example, in chapter one, she argues that Diallo, the protagonist in Kane's Ambiguous Adventure, is both "native informant" and European ethnographer. Similarly, Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, which situates Africa outside of time, as impenetrably dark, and presentist, resonates with pan-Africanist works by Crummel and Blyden who viewed continental Africans, particularly those inland from the coast, as trapped in the past and needing to be brought into the "civilized" time.

Kanneh, however, also uses Achebe's Things Fall Apart to argue that time, particularly the idea of a discrete bounded past, present, or future, is fixed by literacy in the West, whereas in Africa the emphasis on orality blurs these distinctions: "Orality lives in the local, temporal space of the moment, securely attached to the immediacy of presence and constantly subject to the creativity of change. [. . . T]he voice opposes the fixity and authority of literacy" (21). Thus, in one "signifying culture" history is distanced and revered for its textualization and in the other it is improvised by a particular voice in a specific present (21).

While African Identities considers a variety of knowledges that have constituted Africa and black subjectivities over time, its emphasis is on literary texts. Therefore, Kanneh's attempt to understand what it means to be black might be more aptly presented: what does it mean to be black or African according to a transnational black literati? That does not diminish the text's intervention per se, but it would be unfair to ignore the fact that ordinary people's meaning of blackness is not addressed. Further, readers who prefer significant attention to specifics of period, social, class, etc. may find this text bewildering in its breadth and sometimes overly broad language. For example, some might dispute her assumption that literacy is inherently non-African given several well-known instances of African writing systems. The text also tends to use African and black interchangeably without making...