The African Diaspora: Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification

Abstract

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

An Ethnographic Approach to African Diaspora Archaeology: The Bocas Way

“…When working in the African Diaspora, particular ethnographic attention needs to be paid to people archaeologists choose to label with a particular diasporic identity, especially people of mixed heritage. This was foundational to my research, as identities of mixed people within the African Diaspora can take different forms that do not always valorize Africanness (Gordon and Anderson ; Lilley ). Past archaeological research on the African Diaspora has failed to consider local contexts or stakeholders.…”

“…Utilizing the literature relating to ethnographic methodologies in cultural anthropology (Bernard ; Charmaz ; DeWalt and DeWalt ; Fetterman ; Jorgensen ; Rosaldo ; Sanjek ; Yow ), and the emerging field of ethnographic archaeology (Hamilakis , ; Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos ; Hollowell and Mortensen ), I developed what I describe as an ethnographically informed approach to archaeology. This approach recognizes that, as archaeologists, we must understand the sociopolitical climate of the archaeological research area in which we work before starting excavation (Gordon and Anderson ). As I detail below in my case study of Bocas del Toro, my initial site investigation became a modality from which I make sense of the excavation site and surrounding community.…”

Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology

“…Because analyses of creolization have been reworked and updated across several decades, pivotal questions about the relationships between social structure, culture, and context have been revisited and refined. Moreover, since the processes of creolization also invokes the process of diaspora, this work makes important connections between comparative studies and diaspora studies (Gordon and Anderson 1999;Holt 1999) and between area studies and global studies.…”

Heterotópicos e nacionais. Debates histórico-antropológicos sobre o samba na Era Vargas (1930-1945)

“…Daí que o samba seja, também, uma forma de dança (tão polissêmica e heterogênea quanto sua manifestação musical), compondo aquilo que os antropólogos anglo-saxões denominam um "embodied genre" [gênero cultural incorporado] 8 . Esta matriz corporal do samba o conecta com um panteão religioso afro-brasileiro, vinculando-o à 7 Pesquisadores dedicados aos estudos da escravidão africana nas Américas propõem conceber este fenômeno como uma "diáspora" (BUTLER, 2000;GORDON;ANDERSON, 1999, yELVINGTON, 2001. Segundo BUTLER (2000), o conceito de diáspora faz referência "em primeiro lugar, a que o grupo tem dois ou mais destinos.…”