Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-1-209

1527-1900

Christine Hünefeldt,

Race, History, and American Society

As stated in the title, the book’s goal is to illustrate diaspora experiences of African peoples in a comparative framework, that is, to present “Atlantic history within a black cultural context” (p. xix). Diaspora is understood as a paradigm of empowerment and as an analytical tool to underline the “international dimensions, commonalities, and discontinuities in the histories of communities of color.” It is another valuable publication from the Comparative Black History doctoral program at Michigan State University, incorporating the work of junior and senior researchers in a field that has grown immensely over the past decades (for example, see the bibliography compiled by Erik Hofstee, pp. 419–69).Divided into four sections (comparative diaspora historiography; identity and culture; domination and resistance in the New World; and society and power in the Atlantic world), this collection approaches the concept of diaspora from very different angles. Differences in the definitions and accents posed by diasporian studies show some discrepancies among the authors. These are born out of the diaspora idea, and more generally, the tension inherent to comparative studies: the tension between historical context and the aspects that are (and need to be) selected (and thus isolated) for comparative purposes. In addition, the authors also diverge on whether to emphasize commonalities or differences, and on the types of explanations they employ.Different accents are contained in the propositions of Earl Lewis (pp. 3–36), Thomas C. Holt (pp. 33– 44), Dwayne E. Williams (pp. 105–20), Jack P. Greene (pp. 343–66), and Elliott P. Skinner (pp. 45–70). Lewis envisions overlapping diasporas in which the process of identity formation is derived from historical actors’ multipositional experiences. This idea of interconnectedness with other diasporas tends to dilute the African-centered diaspora idea. Historical process is perceived as the cumulative result from successive diaspora experiences of people from various and changing backgrounds. In Earl’s reading, diaspora becomes the way of researching and understanding human interaction. In Holt’s account the black diaspora was at one point in time key to the emergence of the modern world but other developments followed from it, and he posits the need to ground the black diaspora within the confines of “global social processes rooted in the expansion of capitalism” (p. 43). Williams recognizes the need to include “difference” in the diaspora analysis to circumvent racial essentialism; according to him, identity is imposed from without and shaped from within, a dialectical process by which “uniqueness” rather than commonality is forged, especially if the accent is “within.” He chooses a unique community, namely, Portuguese Cape Verdeans in the United States between 1878 and 1921, to illustrate his point. Greene’s article, on the other hand, questions whether terms such as “diaspora,” “encounter,” or “contact” suffice to understand the “competitive and ongoing social interplay” (p. 336), but concedes that the Atlantic and the diaspora paradigms help dismantle the nation-state paradigm. Atlantic history becomes more than a transoceanic framework; it becomes the “landscape in which contemporary regional and cultural similarities, not ultimate membership in some as-yet-uncreated national state would provide the principal criteria of organization” (p. 337).While the contributions of Earl, Holt, Williams, and Greene de-emphasize the all-encompassing analytical value of black diaspora and its solely “Atlantic connection,” Elliott P. Skinner (pp. 45–70), invites us to detect an African-centered paradigm based on people’s experiences, to retrieve African culture traits by showing their persistence. Experiences and persistence are then read as a succession of “invented traditions” (from “black nationality” and negritude to Kwanza) within a universal civilization with pluralistic paradigms. With propositions as different as “capitalist determination” or “cultural retrieval,” the arguments revolve around persistence and diversification, uniqueness and universality, a tension that can hardly be solved.The articles in each section range from very monographic and localized studies (with little or no comparative lines of thought and few links to the diaspora idea) to very broad and encompassing narratives (with comparisons and a discussion of the diaspora idea), the extremes being represented by David Stark’s contribution on eighteenth-century slaves’ marriage and family strategies in Puerto Rico, and Frederick Cooper’s contribution on the literal and symbolic exploitation of Africa from the eighteenth century to the postcolonial period. Overall, the comparative aspect of diasporic analysis is contained more in the aggregation of unique cases than in the systematic use of comparative data in the varied aspects of black experiences analyzed by the authors. It is difficult to “compare” not only for methodological reasons but because some of the black experiences have no counterparts in other places of the Atlantic world, or have remained unresearched.This book contains a set of articles that provide interesting themes worth pursuing for other places and time periods. This is the case of Kim D. Butler’s (pp. 121–33) research on Afro-Brazilians in São Paulo and Salvador that shows how externally imposed identities (race in the first case, culture in the second) were appropriated by Afro-Brazilians to subvert the established order. Such appropriation in turn was made possible by far-reaching homogenizing processes between 1791 and 1888, such as the demise of smaller ethnic categories, the contestation of new bases of exclusion, language, and belief systems, that is, broader based collective identities. Also noteworthy is the research by Philip A. Howard (pp. 134–58) on the creolization of Afro-Cubans; the research by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (pp. 159–75) which brings two female experiences to the Atlantic history; Carlos Aguirre’s (pp. 202–22) attempt to read court records and litigation as a form of effective bargaining in the hands of Lima’s slaves; Michael P. Johnson’s work (pp. 223– 45) on slave migration to towns in the United States Midwest and Liberia and his stress on the importance of family ties; Barry Gaspar’s (pp. 343–66) proposal to reread legislative documents as a way to show how legal frameworks in various slave societies were copied but also contain specific adaptations to local peculiarities and worries in the wake of an expanding plantation system; and the contribution by Edward L. Cox (pp. 367–90) on apprenticeship as a failed transitional device to freedom in Grenada and St. Vincent.An interesting set of articles in this compilation (across the four sections) do not deal with the diaspora idea; instead they show how discourses on blackness, Africa, and Africanness are set in motion. This is the case in George Friedrickson’s article (pp. 71–84) where he interprets propositions in South Africa and the United States concerning the future of relations with whites and the nature of black struggles (“cosmopolitan” or “ethnocentric,” and “reformist” or “revolutionary”); the article by Allison Blakely (pp. 87–104) who traces the evolution of racism by looking at the emergence of a racial vocabulary, the stigmatization of blackness, and the promotion of racism as a science in an interesting tour through children’s books, current jokes, scientific treatises, and dictionaries; the article by Robert Stewart (pp. 179–201) and his discussion of the “negro character” in mainstream Christian churches and black rejection of missionary proprietarianism in postemancipation Jamaica; Lisa E. Davenport’s (pp. 282–15) stellar demonstration of the role of jazz and jazz bands in the management of foreign perceptions of race relations in the United States, or as she puts it, a cultural policy construed on the basis of race (p. 295) in a merging of politics and culture in the practice of diplomacy (p. 305); and most saliently, Frederick Cooper’s contribution (pp. 391– 418) calling for a thorough revision of Europeans’ visions of Africa (and here Africa could easily be replaced with Latin America) by showing how these visions encompassed (and encompass) and justify exploitation. Instead he proposes to reassess historical processes in Africa and their meaning in order to detect (on a macro social and economic level) the particularities and contributions of these historical processes to the emergence or not of capitalist forms of production.More than a critique I have a question for editors Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod. “Atlantic studies” have grown massively over the past years. For the sake of comparison and a more in-depth understanding of “diaspora” and Atlantic history, should we narrow themes and foci? “Common threads” and discrepancies would become clearer, and a narrower coverage could bring in a broader geography. Fifteen of the 18 articles either explicitly deal with the U.S. or the Caribbean or have a U.S. setting in mind. Maybe the Atlantic is a little too small.