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The African Diaspora Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification This article offers an analysis of theoretical models developed around the concept of the African Diaspora. These models either concentrate on essential features common to various peoples of African descent or focus on diaspora as a condition of hybridity characterized by displacement and "dispersed identities. " The authors, calling for ethnographic attention to processes of diasporic identification, argue for a shift in focus toward analysis of the processes through which individuals identify with one another as "Black" or "African." Who Is Black? EDMUND T. GORDON, ONE OF THE AUTHORS, spent almost ten years living on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in a small port town called Bluefields. There he lived among the "Creoles," an African Caribbean people of approximately 20,000 who inhabit that market town and a series of smaller villages scattered along Nicaragua's southern Caribbean coast. A young, Black, politically active, male intellectual, a product of the vexed racial politics of the United States and the nationalist Black power politics characteristic of large sectors of its Black community, Gordon had specific expectations coming to Nicaragua from the United States of the late 1970s. He carried with him a political common sense-a "good sense"-of a centered Blackness that appropriated not only the name (Black) but the essentialism of the white supremacist ideology of the "one drop rule." This was also a globalized notion of Blackness-the African Diaspora as community and identity. On the basis of phenotype he assumed commonalities of racial experience and cultural practice and consequently the global unity of all peoples of "African descent" on the one hand and absolute Black differentiation from whites and "near" whites (mestizos) on the other. Thus armed he arrived on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast expecting to find in its Black "Creole" community a centered African Diasporic identity and race-based politics. What he found was very much more complex. Identity politics certainly operated in the Creole community. However, not only did he have inadequate knowledge of the

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