Introduction
Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/Righting the Pan-American Discourse
Sheila S. Walker
African Contributions to the Americas—and to the Story of the Americas
The millions of Africans who survived the Middle Passage to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade have not been acknowledged for the essential roles they played in the creation of the Atlantic and modern worlds. The extent of the contributions of these Africans and their African Diasporan descendants to the construction and definition of the Americas and of global civilization is only beginning to be taken seriously and to be seriously researched. The fact that everyone has been misinformed about them makes it easy to believe that these contributions were insignificant.
This volume is the result of an international conference on the African Diaspora and the Modern World that I organized in February 1996 as director of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Cosponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), the conference was the principal event held in the United States under the aegis of the United Nations International Year for Tolerance.
The contributors to the volume are urhobophone/anglophone and yorubophone/francophone Africans, and African Americans and Euro-Americans—"American" used in the inclusive continental and insular Pan-American sense—from North and South America and the Caribbean. Lusophone, anglophone, and hispanophone, they represent the major languages of the Americas. They are historians, including economic and culinary; linguists; creative writers and literary scholars; social, cultural, and physical anthropologists; journalists; filmmakers; music and dance scholars who are also musicians, composers, choreographers, singers, and dancers; and political and cultural activists. Many fit into several categories. The volume reflects both scholarly outsider and engaged insider points of view, and in the case of African and African Diasporan scholars, both simultaneously. While also including the extremely valuable contributions of other scholars, it privileges the perspectives of Africans and African Diasporans in telling the stories of their own communities.
The contributors are committed to (re)writing and righting the story of the African presence in the Americas and to discovering and revealing old and new truths with which to replace old and new omissions, misrepresentations, and myths. A major intention is to help correct the partial, hence inaccurate, version that has been told of the story of the Americas; partial because the contributions of the Americas’ now second largest population have been consistently and systematically minimized, distorted, or ignored.
Until the early nineteenth century, hence for more than three hundred of the five-hundred-year modern history of the Americas, Africans and their descendants were the Americas’ largest population. Therefore, the demographic foundation of the Americas was African, not European. According to historian Philip Curtin, in his seminal The African Slave Trade: A Census, "For the Americas, both North and South, Africans who came by way of the slave trade were the most numerous Old World immigrants until the late eighteenth century. And it is equally clear that more Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas between, say, 1492 and 1770."
And according to the introduction to the CD-ROM database The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, "As Europeans colonized the Americas, a steady stream of European peoples migrated to the Americas between 1492 and the early nineteenth century. But what is often overlooked is that before 1820, perhaps three times as many enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic as Europeans. This was the largest transoceanic migration of a people until that day, and it provided the Americas with a crucial labor force for their own economic development."
That some American nations officially encouraged European migration in the nineteenth century specifically to "whiten" their populations, which helps explain the precipitous decline in the proportion of African descendants that Romero Rodríguez and Lucía Molina and Mario López describe in this volume for Argentina, demonstrates this fundamental demographic fact. Curtin makes the point that, "historians have too often regarded the Afro-American community created by the trade as an alien body on the periphery of national life." Yet the fact that the Americas were demographically more African American than Euro-American during the first three centuries when the foundations of the new societies were being laid, logically affirms that the African human and cultural presence had to be an important ingredient in their creation.
It is important to emphasize that these Africans who came to the Americas constituted not merely a "labor force," which in the context of slavery in the Americas connotes physical, not intellectual, labor. The transatlantic slave trade also involved the very deliberate selection of Africans on the basis of their specific knowledge and skills that were needed for the development of the Americas. Therefore, this largest human migration also constituted the world’s first massive brain drain and transfer of technology from Africa to the Americas, which established the basis for contemporary power relations in the Atlantic world.
It is, thus, impossible to understand the past and present of the Americas without understanding the African presence in the Americas. Much of African American, and all-American, history and behavior is explicable only in light of its African antecedents. Africa remains present in the nature of economic systems, in struggles for and concepts of freedom and justice, in technology and material culture, in the arts and the art of celebration, in popular culture, in spirituality and religion, in everyday language and gastronomy.
By offering new data, interpretations, and theories, this volume explicitly challenges the conceptualization of the Americas as a European construct and construction. Historian Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, the major library and archive of the Black experience in the world, argues in chapter 5 that it was the transatlantic slave trade that shaped the modern world by fostering the development of the levels of communication, trade, cultural exchange, and economic and political interdependence among the nations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas that characterize the modern era.
If African participation in the creation of the Americas has been ignored, Africans have been given even less credit for their roles in the development of modern Europe. Curtin says that, "The traditional national histories of European states . . . tend to view the slave trade as something peripheral to their own social and political development. " Yet Europeans, Dodson asserts, reorganized their political, economic, social, and cultural institutions to carry out the vast trade in human lives that was the most important international commercial activity of the era. This commercial activity became a basis for European wealth, power, and imperialist expansion.
A major consequence of the slave trade, Dodson reminds us, was the peopling of the Americas with Africans, who formed much of the human foundation on which the Americas were built, and whose presence and activities were of key importance during the formative period of the new nations. In the necessary process of re-creating themselves in their new milieu, these Diasporan Africans invented and participated in the inventing of new cultural forms such as languages, religions, foods, aesthetic expressions, and political and social organizations.
Economic historian Joseph Inikori states in chapter 6, in agreement with Dodson and using quantitative data to support his contentions, that for the three and a half centuries between 1500 and 1850, it was the labor of African peoples enslaved in the Americas that was at the center of the economic development of the Atlantic world. During this period, large-scale commodity production in the Americas transformed the Atlantic Ocean into the busiest trading mart in the world, with trade among European countries depending heavily on American products. It was the forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the slave trade, and the forced labor of their descendants in the Americas through the plantation system, that made this large-scale production possible and profitable. Inikori contends that, "According to recent estimates, 75% of the American products traded during the period were produced by Africans and their descendants in the Americas."
Why, one might wonder, should such critical information about the creation of the Americas and the Atlantic world come as such a surprise? In discussing this seminal role of Africans and their descendants in the development of the economies of the Atlantic world, Inikori notes that a fundamental problem in scientific discussions concerning the economics of the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas has been conceptual. Using appropriate theories in order to pose the right questions, identify relevant evidence to seek, and interpret facts correctly is, he says, the real basis of empirical research. This seemingly obvious observation leads him to conclude that the African presence in the economic history of the Atlantic world has been invisibilized by theories and perspectives that have focused attention on other issues. Discussions of the origins of the modern economies of the Atlantic world have simply neglected to mention that it was Africans and their descendants who paid with their lives the high price of this development by providing the involuntary and unremunerated, both skilled and unskilled, labor that made it possible.
The literature on the economics of the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas, Inikori contends, involves many obsolete or inappropriate theories that have discounted the role of the slave trade and slavery as key factors in explaining the comparative economic development of the continents of the Atlantic basin. Thus, the essential role of the twelve to fifteen million Africans and their descendants whose labor was the economic basis for the development of the Atlantic world has been erased by theoretical approaches that have "disappeared" them by focusing elsewhere.
In contrast to such empirical realities, a recent Worth magazine article titled "How America Got Rich," cites as the causes of the wealth of the United States: a geographic advantage, being isolated by oceans from potential attackers; raw materials for trade and commerce and rich cropland; an unfortunately annihilated indigenous population, allowing a depopulated territory to develop without effective opposition; and a Western Christian culture fostering a sense of progress. Curiously missing from this idyllic account, in the kind of mass-market publication that forges public opinion and what passes for knowledge, is any mention, however slight or indirect, of the enslaved labor force that was the basis of the creation of this immense wealth.
The contributors to this volume challenge inaccurate perspectives based on inadequate, limited, and unimaginative searches for information and interpretations that sometimes result from a failure to understand, or reluctance to give credence to, possible sources of unexpected knowledge. This includes genuinely acknowledging the authority of the oral tradition of community "keepers of culture," whose presence and knowledge anthropologist and museum professional Diana Baird N’Diaye (chapter 13) had to overcome considerable resistance to include in a Smithsonian Institution project. It also involves understanding what constitutes essential knowledge and where to find it, such as the knowledge anthropologist Yvonne Daniel (chapter 23) found "embodied" in African Diasporan sacred dance.
The contributors also challenge disobliging points of view and theories that deliberately or casually disempower African Diasporan subjects. Distinguished professor of history Joseph Harris, the dean of African Diasporan studies who organized the first international conference in the United States on the African Diaspora at Howard University in 1979, characterizes the African Diaspora as a worldwide phenomenon. Since ancient times, Harris notes (chapter 4), Africans have traveled outside the continent in a variety of roles, often as free people, and have settled in and made important contributions to societies of Europe and Asia as well as the Americas. Offering evidence of the continuity of the consciousness of and identity with Africa by members of these global Diasporan communities, he maintains that Africa has remained present in their religion, music, dance, language, and oral traditions.
Harris attributes the pervasive ignorance of the global nature of the African presence to stereotypes of Africans as inferior, without a meaningful history, and uncivilized and so incapable of having contributed to world civilization. Functioning as unquestioned premises promoting the maintenance of theories that discount the possibility that Africans have been major actors in the creation of the Atlantic world, these myths persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Such myths account for the scholarly tendency that Dodson and Inikori cite, to simply ignore the central role of enslaved Africans in the development of the Atlantic world.
Information provided here comes from new sources, some of whose existence is not only not commonly known, but that is even sometimes specifically denied. Afro-Uruguayan Tomás Olivera Chirimini (chapter 15), who, based on his archival and oral historical research produces Afro-Uruguayan performances for national and international audiences, read in a U.S. encyclopedia that there was no population of African origin in Uruguay. It felt odd, he said, to learn from such an authoritative source that neither he nor the community of which he was a part existed. And a list of populations of African origin in the Americas appropriately titled "Are We or Aren’t We?" explicitly characterized as "zero" the Afro-Argentinean population of whose current activities Afro-Argentinean Lucía Molina (chapter 21) and Afro-Uruguayan Romero Rodríguez (chapter 20) write.
Inspired by Olivera Chirimini’s experience, I was curious to see what a current U.S. encyclopedia might say about the four African Diasporan populations of the Southern Cone of South America that are the subjects of the chapters by Olivera Chirimini, Molina, and Rodríguez. The Encyclopaedia Britannica Online says of Argentina: "Population estimates of the colonial period suggest that by 1810 Argentina had more than 400,000 people. . . . Ten percent were black and mulatto, either slaves or descendants of slaves who had been smuggled into the country through Buenos Aires. . . . It was the great wave of European immigration after the mid-1890s that molded the present-day ethnic and racial character of Argentina. The Indians and mestizos were pushed aside or absorbed, and the blacks and mulattos disappeared."
The Encyclopaedia says of Bolivia: "The population of Bolivia consists of three groups—the Indians, the mestizos (of mixed Indian and Spanish descent), and the descendants of the Spaniards." Of Paraguay it says: "The vast majority of the inhabitants are native Paraguayans, who are almost all mestizo (a mixture of Spanish and Indian)." And of Uruguay: "The Uruguayans of today are predominantly of European origin, mostly descendants of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants. . . . Of the small number of Blacks in the country, most came southward from Brazil." The contributors offer correctives to Britannica’s (mis)representation of the realities of the African Diasporan populations of all four countries.
A good place to seek new ideas, data, and theories is outside the traditional academic discourses that have created and perpetuated the old ones that were based on the limited human composition, hence the limited worldview and concerns, of the scholarly establishment. Cultural leaders from African Diasporan communities, who have not been included in academic discourses about themselves, enrich the discourse here by telling their own stories based on their own experiences, perspectives, and interests. These are people about and for whom others have assumed the privilege of speaking—others who presume to represent them in their absence, while neglecting to facilitate their presence. I met them during the research travels I undertook in my quest to understand the African Diaspora. Lucía Molina from Argentina, Gilberto Leal from Brazil, Romero Rodríguez from Uruguay, and Jesús García from Venezuela are all internationally recognized leaders who are actively engaged in the struggle to discover and use accurate knowledge about their histories in the interest of improving the lives of their communities in the present.
As thoughtful participants and respected leaders in, researchers about, and promoters of the continuing development of their own cultures, they may be reasonably considered to be authorities on them. Like many of the scholars, they are involved in recovering and documenting their communities’ neglected stories as a corrective to misrepresentative official histories and exclusionary national identities. Where necessary, they are also challenging disempowering scholarly (mis)representations. Gilberto Leal (chapter 18), for example, contrasts the well-documented history of persistent Afro-Brazilian resistance to bondage with still-influential scholarly representations of Brazilian slavery as a benign institution with an accommodated enslaved population.
In using new perspectives, data, theories, and sources of knowledge, as well as new interpretations of old sources of knowledge, the contributors are challenging and changing the stories of the Americas, making them more accurate by including both peoples and points of view that have been systematically excluded. Scholars and nonscholars alike bring interests and perspectives to bear that were not only not formed in traditional academia, but that are, on the contrary, often based on their efforts to rediscover and reclaim a historical role and cultural heritage that the academic establishment has been complicit in trivializing, misdefining, and invisibilizing.
The fact that most of the scholars are members of African and African Diasporan societies allows them to view these societies from the point of view of participants whose native knowledge is further informed, and critically enriched, by the acquired perspective of a scholarly discipline, and often by comparative experience and research in several African and African Diasporan societies. They are, thus, researchers with privileged insights because of their dualistic gaze as insider–outsiders, whom Yvonne Daniel (chapter 23) would characterize as "observing participants."
They also evidence what African American anthropologist St. Clair Drake termed a "vindicationist perspective," which has historically characterized much of African American intellectual life. According to Drake, "What came to be called ‘vindicating the Negro’ emerged to counteract White Racism. It involved correcting stereotypes, setting the record straight, and substituting a more accurate picture of reality." The interest of the African and African Diasporan scholars represented here in accurately telling the stories of their own communities is necessarily different from that of scholars motivated by intellectual curiosity and a desire to develop or test theories, even when fueled by a commitment to honesty and justice. Their intention is to lend their voices to the telling of a truer, more inclusive story of the Americas, in which the integral and essential roles played by their ancestors and contemporaries is no longer omitted.
These insider scholars have a special perspective on and interest in what is defined as significant based on the logic of their own lives and the lives of their communities, as well as on their disciplinary training. Reflecting this common concern, Brenda Dixon Gottschild (chapter 3) says, "what is spoken or silenced depends on who is speaking, who is doing the documenting, from whose perspective, by whose criteria, and what is being recorded."
Afrogenic Interpretations of African Diasporan Realities
"Are you hip to the jive?" was a question I often heard my father, James Walker, and his friends ask when I was growing up in New Jersey. They were questioning whether or not you really understood what was really happening, as distinguished from what you only thought you understood about what might only appear to be happening—from the simplest to the most profound meanings of that understanding. To be hip to the jive and to hip others to the jive are the major tasks of the contributors to this volume.
In chapter 1, about discovering Africa in New Jersey, I note that in my efforts to understand behaviors for which my community lacked explanations satisfying to me, terminology was a key to an alternative way of authoritative knowing and interpreting. Explanations for valid behavior in the United States have been and continue to be Eurocentric. Behavior not fitting a Eurocentric model has tended to be interpreted, more or less subtly, as somehow pathological, rather than as logical and legitimate products of radically different histories and experiences.
In his foreword to By the Work of Their Hands by John Michael Vlach, historian Lawrence Levine cites some key scholarly texts that have specifically denied that U.S. African Americans have a distinctive cultural heritage. Levine says that scholarship, rather than understanding African Americans as "complex amalgams of African and European cultures," has characterized us as the result of "imperfect acculturation to Euro-American cultures." This respected scholarly tradition has, he says, "depicted African-Americans as the one group that had lost its entire indigenous culture . . . among all of the peoples that constituted the United States."
Levine notes that Gunnar Myrdal states in An American Dilemma that, "American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture." Levine also cites Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, in their influential Beyond the Melting Pot, claim that, "The Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no culture and values to value and protect."
Such perspectives remain alive and well, overtly or covertly, in spite of substantial empirical evidence to the contrary. These kinds of Eurocentric pathology interpretations of African American behavior, however, made no sense to me or to other reflective members of my community with whom I discussed them in my efforts to understand our culture. And they certainly made no sense of the culturally normal and normative behaviors that surrounded and intrigued me.
The problem was not that community members did not have interpretations. The problem was rather that I did not know how to interpret the revealing interpretations that were articulated in familiar everyday language of which I did not fully understand the implications. (I was not hip to the jive.) Only as a result of comparative experiences in Africa and the African Diaspora, which offered me a broader worldview and more complex interpretative schema, was I able to begin to discover terminological clues hinting at interpretations and at unexpected African origins and meanings for familiar African American behaviors. I found these linguistic hints in the ways in which people talked of the spirit by which they were filled and moved in religious celebrations; in the terms by which they referred to people and characterized behaviors and attitudes; in the names by which they called people; and in the words with which they designated their secular and sacred, regular and ritual cuisines.
I also discovered that the best way to understand this African Diasporan reality was literally on its own terms. And I learned that some of these terms remain African. The obvious idea of seeking to understand a culture in and on its own terms should not appear either surprising or revolutionary, until one seeks instances in which African Diasporan culture has been analyzed in and on African Diasporan terms. A recent book that stands out for doing so concerning African American women is anthropologist Leith Mullings’s aptly titled On Our Own Terms.
Terms about which I had been curious as I was growing up proved to be seminal in helping me understand African Diasporan behaviors. I had understood the meanings of the words, but had had no idea of where they came from in the human geographical sense, or where they "were coming from" in the conceptual sense. The explanation was not in the Eurocentric system where I had been taught that I should seek and find explanations for all American behavior. It was rather in an alternative system that was not supposed to exist. But it does. I characterize this system as "Afrogenic."
Afrogenic simply means growing out of the histories, ways of being and knowing, and interpretations and interpretive styles of African and African Diasporan peoples. It refers to these communities’ experiences, priorities, and styles, and their articulations of them, while acknowledging that most human behavior is not intellectually articulated by the actors who perform it, and that plural interpretations of similar behaviors are obviously possible.
Afrogenic also refers to the interpretations and interpretive methods of African and African Diasporan scholars as a result of our roles as community members whose academic positionality is necessarily mediated by this belonging. The perspectives and methodologies of these scholars manifest a creative tension resulting from our being products of the epistemologies and hermeneutics—the ways of authoritative knowing and interpreting—of our own communities, and of having also mediated through these primary sources other, sometimes competing or incompatible, epistemologies and hermeneutics encountered in the academy. Reciprocally, Eurogenic relates to experiences and interpretations of people of European and European Diasporan origins.
It is entirely possible, to say nothing of intellectually honest, for people who are not of African descent to manifest an Afrogenic perspective, as contributors to this volume clearly demonstrate. They can do so, and do so here, by acknowledging African and African Diasporan agency, by assuming the "blackness" as well as the "whiteness" of the Pan-American experience, by challenging Eurocentric (mis)interpretations of Afrogenic behaviors, and by being committed to telling an inclusive and accurate story of the Americas. Although adding an Afrogenic approach does not, of course, exhaust the perspectives that must be considered in order to tell the full story of the Americas, since multiple indigenous American points of view can obviously not be conscientiously excluded, inclusion of the now second Pan-American population represents progress.
An Afrogenic perspective necessarily recognizes the special importance of terminologies associated with, and generated by, the experiences of African and African Diasporan communities. These are our privileged expressions and interpretations of our lives and of our ways of experiencing and seeing them, and of pointing out what is important in them. African Diasporan societies have consciously articulated and unconsciously acted out distinctive epistemologies and hermeneutics, which it behooves scholars to discover and use as points of departure and as road maps for descriptive and analytical efforts. Eliciting and providing such insider interpretations of reality, Afrogenic principles and priorities around which African Diasporan communities organize our social institutions and cultural production, are part of the task undertaken by contributors to this volume.
Exemplifying such an Afrogenic perspective, linguist Olabiyi Yai (chapter 14), in discussing the need for a "terminological, epistemological, and hermeneutical overhauling" of approaches to understanding the African Diaspora, argues that it is "scientifically unsound to uncritically ‘inherit’ and endorse the conceptual tools forged by one’s oppressors’ organic intellectuals to discourse on oneself and one’s realities." He urges as an antidote the use of African and African Diasporan Creole terms "as media of scientific discourse."
One way to do so is to seek out and seek to understand the meanings and implications of African and African Diasporan terms that are in common usage, as Yai does with the African Diasporan concept of nation. Gilberto Leal (chapter 18) and Jesús García (chapter 17) use African terms to characterize African and African Diasporan resistance to enslavement in Brazil and Venezuela. Leal uses Yoruba terms, Yoruba culture being one of the African cultures best represented in contemporary Brazil, to characterize active and passive resistance to slavery. And García conceptualizes an Afro-Venezuelan "culture of resistance" in Kikongo terms that he learned while seeking unacknowledged origins and roots of Venezuelan life in the Republic of the Congo, culture of Central African Bantu-speaking origin being the dominant African influence in Venezuela.
The complex of terms that García uses expresses a worldview based on premises similar to those that Bantu speakers might have brought with them to the Americas, premises which, even if not consciously articulated in exactly the same way, could have served as the basis for their understanding of, survival in, and resistance to the oppressive situation in which they found themselves. Africans arriving in the Americas necessarily used African terms to designate their resistance to the system of enslavement, terms designating concepts that their descendants would have perpetuated in their continuing resistance to slavery and oppression. Some contemporary African Diasporan leaders are using such terms to conceptualize resistant behavior affirming African Diasporan agency in the past and present.
García’s discussion of this Bantu linguistic complex that provides the philosophical basis of an Afro-Venezuelan culture of resistance is akin to the U.S. African American survival linguistic complex expressed in an African language that I discovered in New Jersey. I found the original meanings of the words in Africa, but could not have found the linguistic complex there because it was developed in conditions of enslavement in the Americas. It is noteworthy that a term from this slavery era complex was revived during the 1960s Black consciousness movement, a recent high point of African American resistance, self-redefinition, and affirmation that radically modified U.S. society.
U.S. African Americans have used "hip" and "jive," words from Wolof, the principal language of Senegal, to make significant epistemological and hermeneutical statements about ways of knowing, understanding, and interpreting life. "Jive," from jef, which Senegalese Wolof speakers translate into French, their official national language, as pas sérieux (not serious), proves most useful for the extremely serious intellectual overhaul that Yai proposes. The issue is to discourse critically on our own experiences and realities both in and on our own terms. Doing so offers an Afrogenic corrective to the inherent contradiction of discussing ourselves in and on the Eurogenic terms of those who have appropriated for themselves the right to define us without our consent, for their interests not ours, and often in such a way that we are either insulted or are unable to recognize ourselves.
Along this line, the dearth of "slaves," as opposed to "enslaved Africans" or "enslaved people," in a volume on the African Diaspora is perhaps worthy of comment. This terminological preference corresponds to Mullings’s observation concerning the discussion of slavery on terms other than our own. She notes that she and other African American students "squirmed with discomfort and embarrassment" when slavery was presented in U.S. history lessons, "knowing something was wrong, but bereft of the knowledge that could empower us." As presented, "the slaves were clearly pitiful things without history, volition, or agency." Only later did she become conscious that, "describing [them] as ‘enslaved’ (by someone) rather than ‘slaves’ (an inherent state of being) shifts the burden of culpability and transgression."
The terminological choice expressed here refuses to collaborate in the reification of a condition that has been given the connotation, with scholarly collusion, of representing the entire existence of enslaved African and African Diasporan human beings. Although that may have been the intention of their enslavers, it was clearly not a result to which enslaved people acquiesced. This linguistic overhaul also conveys an assertion of a sense of the volition and agency of people who, albeit living in lifetime bondage, were actively engaged in re-creating their identities and in creating new dynamic cultures that have helped to define both the Americas and contemporary global society.
Concerning this issue of accurate representation and self-recognition, I had not expected to find that a dictionary would constitute a problem, nor had I anticipated bringing one into my chapter on discovering Africa in New Jersey. I had seen dictionaries as "objective" sources of word meanings and had not expected to find myself in an adversarial intellectual relationship with one that I was shocked to find so culturally insulting. I had, admittedly naïvely, never considered the extent to which the ways in which the people who construct dictionaries and determine the authoritative meanings of words, the building blocks of societal communication and interpretation, logically reflect prevalent biases as well as more general cultural currents.
"Hip" means to have one’s eyes wide open, to be keenly aware, as well as to make others aware. "Jive," as Afrogenically used by U.S. African Americans, relates to the art of dissimulation. The dictionary, which probably does a fine job for Eurogenic words, defines dissimulation as "to hide under a false appearance," derived from "simulate," meaning "to give or assume the appearance or effect of, often with the intent to deceive." It defines jive as a "special jargon or difficult slang" and as "glib, deceptive, or foolish talk," as if these three terms were comparable.
The idea of a special jargon is probably more accurate than intended when one considers U.S. African American English as a linguistic system originating in a situation of enslavement, and involving deliberate dissimulation and subterfuge as a fundamental and essential survival strategy. The definition of jive as glib and foolish talk, although accurate on a superficial level, represents a trivializing perception of a term involving much greater interpretative profundity, and reflects an external perception that fails to account for the considered intentionality, and the sense of deliberate agency, of consciously deceptive, jive-talking African and African Diasporan actors and actresses. The definition also indicates that the jive worked if it was understood so superficially.
Africans enslaved in the Americas found themselves in a situation in which they could not possibly tell the truth to their European and Euro-American enslavers who did not even acknowledge them as human beings. According to the introduction to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, "for those Europeans who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles, wheat, or even sugar."
These Africans would hardly reveal their truths to those who bought and transported them "tightly packed" or "loosely packed" based on calculations of what percentage of African lives they could lose and still make a profit, in the holds of ships they specifically conceived and constructed to transport human beings as if they were inanimate merchandise referred to in French, for example, as bois d’ébène (ebony wood); who literally worked them to death in order to enrich themselves, as demonstrated by the skeletal remains that Michael Blakey (chapter 12) discusses from New York’s African Burial Ground; and whose concept of truth, whatever it may have been, was obviously the antithesis of that of the people they sought, unsuccessfully, to dehumanize.
A telling example of ways in which European enslavers thought of African human beings in nonhuman, commoditized terms is found in the concept of a pieza de India(s) (a "piece of the Indies"), the "Indies" Columbus was seeking referring to the Americas he "discovered." Often shortened to pieza, the term piece, according to historian Leslie Rout, referred to "the theoretical mean used to define the ideal slave; an African male between the ages of eighteen and thirty, with no physical defects, and at least five feet tall."
According to Philip Curtin:
Most asiento contracts gave the quantities to be delivered in piezas de India, not individual slaves. A pieza de India was a potential measure of labor, not of individuals. For a slave to qualify as a pieza, he had to be a young adult male meeting certain specifications as to size, physical condition, and health. The very young, the old, and females were defined for commercial purposes as fractional parts of a pieza de India. This measure was convenient for Spanish imperial economic planning, where the need was a given amount of labor power, not a given number of individuals. For the historian, however, it means that the number of individuals delivered will always be greater than the number of piezas recorded. Market conditions in Africa made it impossible to buy only prime slaves and leave all the rest, but the extent of the difference varied greatly with time and place. The asiento of the Portuguese Cacheu Company in 1693, for example, provided for an annual delivery in Spanish America of 4,000 slaves, so distributed in sex, age, and condition as to make up 2,500 piezas de India.
The concept of Africans and African Diasporans as fractional was not limited to Spanish America. The U.S. Constitution, in fact, designated enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person for purposes of federal apportionment of taxation and congressional representation:
Representative and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Whereas Euro-Americans endeavored to define the total reality of the Africans they purchased to do with as they pleased, enslaved Africans and their descendants, who considered themselves full, not partial, human beings, insisted upon defining themselves by and for themselves in their own terms, some of which still maintain explanatory power. That enslaved Africans also succeeded in defining themselves on their own terms, in spite of all the powerful, colonial and national government-enforced efforts to make it impossible for them to do so, is evident in their creation of the many original cultures and cultural forms of the African Diaspora, as well as in their important recognized and unrecognized contributions to the cultures of all of the Americas and to global society.
To survive and even create in unimaginably adverse circumstances, Africans and their descendants had no choice but to practice artful dissimulation, subtle subterfuge, and serious jive in their interactions with whites whose interests were, by definition, antithetical to those of the people they considered their chattel, whom they included not on human census rolls, but rather on property inventories along with their tables and chairs, with their cows and pigs. How else might a thinking person account for the "happy smiling darky" Euro-American stereotype for the human beings they kept imprisoned in generations of lifetimes of perpetual bondage?
An African American saying states that, "I’ve got one mind for my master, and one mind for myself." I’ve got a jive version of what I think/believe/know for the person who tries to control me, and I keep my real truth for myself and my people. What was perceived as glib and foolish talk by those who were intended to be deceived often protected the profound truths of those who were consciously, carefully, and selectively deceiving.
The concept of jive as deception and dissimulation must, however, be applied in both directions. The first concerns the ways in which African Americans jived their white enslavers in order to resist their efforts at total control, and joked among themselves about doing so. The other is the way in which white enslavers invented and presented jive versions, deceptive misrepresentative versions, of African, African Diasporan, and consequently Pan-American history to the world, and pretended that it was the truth, perhaps joking among themselves about "getting over" on their victims—both materially and intellectually. The dissimulative way in which the story of the Americas has been told such that it denies, minimizes, and distorts African and African Diasporan roles in it has been successfully jive in that it has deceived everyone, even convincing of its validity many of the very people whose experiences it has misrepresented.
Thus, a major task of African and African Diasporan scholars, and of all scholars committed to telling an accurate and honest story about the African Diaspora, therefore to telling an accurate and honest story about the Americas, is to become hip to the jive, to see and see through the jive, the dissimulation, the hiding of the presence of Africa in all of the Americas under false appearances with the obvious intention of deceiving. Having become hip to the jive ourselves, knowing what is really happening as opposed to what we have been told is happening, knowing that the version of "the truth" told by those who have assumed the authority to tell it is not true, our next task is to hip others to the falsely authoritative jive and to tell a more honest because more inclusive version of the truth.
"Origin Unknown": Invisibilizing Africanity versus "Made in Africa" or Si no es del Congo, es de Carabalí
I found Africa not only where I was not taught to expect to find it, but even where I was specifically taught not to expect it to be—in New Jersey. My later experiences in Africa and in the African Diaspora beyond New Jersey enabled me to begin to recognize signs and expressions—to understand what I had been seeing, hearing, saying, even tasting—and to perceive clues leading to explanations, interpretations, and various levels of meaning.
U.S. African American and other scholars and cultural leaders have been arguing throughout the twentieth century, and increasingly since the Black consciousness/Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist period of the 1960s, that the culture of U.S. African Americans, like that of other African descendants in the Americas, continues to reflect its African heritage. Although this fact should seem obvious, the firm belief of most people in the United States, including many African Americans, is that there is no such continuing African presence. Or if it exists, it exists mainly in music and dance and maybe the least mainstream versions of religion. Therefore, it can be found only in areas of expressive culture that are not part of what are considered the serious bases of society, such as political systems, economics, and technology, as my professors insistently, but unsuccessfully, tried to teach me during my graduate study in anthropology.
Even in areas of the Americas in which the African presence is unmistakable and acknowledged, such as Brazil, this presence tends to be folklorized rather than defined as an essential part of the foundation of the nation. This presumed absence of African culture worthy of serious respect has deprived U.S. and other African Diasporans of an accurate sense of meaningful origins to make profound sense of significant behaviors. It has deprived all Americans of a way to account for Pan-American Afrogenic behaviors of whose origins almost everyone is unaware, or maybe uninterested in recognizing or unwilling to acknowledge. It has also permitted the history and present of the Americas to be told in a partial, hence fictional, rather than complete, hence accurate, manner. The result is that what should be the commonly told story of all of us in the Americas is only the partially told story of some of us.
This declared or presumed absence allows the origins of words of probable African provenience, for example, words of useful interpretive value for understanding African Diasporan culture on its own terms, to be characterized as "unknown," rather than as "made in Africa," as I discovered in looking up "hip" and "jive" in a dictionary that boldly claims to be "The Voice of Authority." Looking words up in the dictionary, rather than being the banal act I had anticipated, proved to be an unanticipatedly Eurocentric experience, as I recount in chapter 1. The one word of the Wolof linguistic complex I identified for which an origin, a Eurogenic origin, was provided, misrepresented both the source of the word and the experiences of the African American speakers who most publicly used it.
This terminological example is symbolic of larger issues of interpretation in significant areas of the African Diaspora in which Africa is not, in what would appear to be a logical contradiction, assumed as the source of African Diasporan behaviors. Yet Eurogenic interpretations of such behaviors necessarily misinterpret them. A major result, as exemplified in the dictionary example, is the misattribution of African and African Diasporan contributions to the Americas, as John Vlach (chapter 10) discusses with respect to pottery in the United States. Such misattributions may qualify Afrogenic contributions as Eurogenic when the Eurogenic usages, as in the linguistic cases I cite, are either derivative from Afrogenic usages, or are misrepresentations based on an apparent discounting of the possibility of an Afrogenic alternative.
Ironically, this failure to acknowledge African origins, in favor of seeking explanations for African Diasporan behaviors in Eurogenic premises and concepts, coincides with the perspective of those U.S. African Americans who have been successfully "miseducated," as African American historian Carter G. Woodson asserted in his 1933 book The Miseducation of the Negro, to disavow their African origins and claim that they "ain’t left nothin’ in no Africa." It also coincides with the perspective of those hispanophone Americans who affirm their European ancestry and deny their African ancestry, but of whom others say, "Si no es del Congo, es de Carabalí," (If s/he’s not from the Congo, s/he’s from Calabar). Thus, "origin unknown" is preferable to "made in Africa" from the perspectives of antithetical groups of descendants of both enslavers and enslaved. There are, for balance, also people who claim African origins for African Diasporan behaviors, but who, in the absence of adequate and adequately accessible research, are often unaware of the specific historical links.
The contributors to this volume encourage and demonstrate a perspective that involves looking at the Americas through a glass darkly, so to speak, as a corrective to the whitewash that has obscured the rich and complex multicolored mosaic that the societies of Pan-America really represent, whose origins are from the Congo and Calabar and elsewhere in Africa, as well as from various parts of Europe and the indigenous Americas. Brenda Dixon Gottschild (chapter 3) suggests that in order to understand what she terms the "Africanist" presence in the Americas, we should reverse positions and view American culture(s) as Africanist, looking at presumably Euro-American behaviors through an Afrogenic black light that highlights different forms, that shines light on things imperceptible in the usual Eurogenic white light—black light highlighting things invisibilized by white light, so offering different interpretive models.
In regard to looking at ourselves and our African Diasporan societies from an Afrogenic rather than Eurogenic perspective, Jesús García (chapter 17) says, similar to Olabiyi Yai (chapter 14), that we need to engage in a process of self-reconceptualization in order to free ourselves from the disorienting effects of Eurogenic concepts, norms, and terminologies. To think Afrogenically involves an active, deliberate, and vigilant process of mental decolonization. As a result of both Eurocentric formal education and the informal education of everyday life in the Americas, we have all been taught, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin says (chapter 2), to assume whiteness rather than blackness as the origin and explanation of American behaviors.
I began to discover this fact while seeking explanations of U.S. African American behaviors for which the whiteness hypothesis lacked explanatory value, but for which an officially sanctioned alternative was lacking. I initially assumed, for example, that the name of an elderly African American woman I met was a modification of a European name, rather than considering the possibility that it might be an African name.
For those of us with extensive academic training, hence with years of being taught, tested on, and approved for our command of and ability to reproduce and retransmit Eurogenic concepts and arguments, this need for mental decolonization is especially essential. This Eurocentric learning was accomplished in academic environments characterized by an absence of a sanctioned Afrogenic intellectual balance with which to reconcile the difference between what we lived in our communities, so knew to be true, and what we were taught by others not from those communities, and were expected to believe to be true, however unrepresentative of and irrelevant to our empirical reality. We were to believe what we were told, rather than what we saw with "our own lying eyes."
Exemplifying this situation, Mullings says of those of us who were working toward academic degrees during the transformative 1960s, as we also sought to decolonize our minds:
It is perhaps difficult for many young students today to fully comprehend what it meant to have virtually no faculty of color, few courses that reflected our experiences, and—almost always—highly distorted accounts of the lives of people of color . . . While seeking to transform the academy, we had to live within it; we rejected their models, but had to do so in their language. We knew that much of what passed as objective knowledge was at best inadequate and distorted and at worst racist, oppressive, and false. The student of color often labored to reformulate the paradigm without assistance from sympathetic faculty. In retrospect, this is not surprising when one considers that the critique entailed challenging not only the paradigms but also the institutions that supported them. (emphasis added)
Those of us engaged in the multiethnic, international, multidisciplinary encounter that this volume represents are trying to provide balance to narrowly Eurocentric/Eurogenic perspectives on the Americas that by definition misrepresent us all.
My quest to understand the African basis of U.S. African American culture during my graduate studies was not only not encouraged, but was actively discouraged, and even ridiculed by professors responsible for the evolution of my intellectual orientation. When I told my academic advisor how pleased I was to have come across Melville Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past, which provided extensive African and African Diasporan data to support the idea that U.S. African Americans have an African heritage, he summarily dismissed such ideas as "rubbish." That is the kind of statement that sticks in your mind, especially coming from someone responsible for your academic success and hence your future career. Although the details vary, I know that my experience of the denial of the African presence in the Americas was not unique among African Diasporans in academia seeking to discover and defend an Afrogenic perspective on our own lives.
The empirical evidence that I encountered in the process of the mental decolonization that evolved during my wonderings and wanderings in Africa and the African Diaspora, hipped me to the fact that Eurogenic explanations and theories emanating from the "(Euro)American way of life" could not possibly explain African Diasporan behaviors. Based on the assumptions of descendants of enslavers rather than descendants of the enslaved, such Eurogenic premises by definition obscure more plausible Afrogenic meanings, as my aforementioned dictionary experience demonstrated.
That my wonderings about U.S. African American behaviors, and my discovering of answers in Africa and elsewhere in the African Diaspora, led me to adopt an Afrogenic perspective on African Diasporan realities sounds simple and obvious. It is not so simple and obvious, however, in the context of the power relationships, intellectual and otherwise, on the basis of which the Americas were constructed and continue to function.
My wonderings led me to wander into what García (chapter 17) characterizes as "intellectual palenques and quilombos" (Spanish and Portuguese designations for autonomous communities created by Africans and African Diasporan "maroons" who liberated themselves from enslavement), which I understand as resistant spaces of Afrogenic thought, practice, and expression. These are spaces of intellectual marooning in which it is not only possible, but even required, to abandon Eurogenic models in the interest of mentally liberating Afrogenic reflection. This perspective allowed me to not only see the Africanity of much "blackness," but even to see the "blackness" of much presumed "whiteness." I learned empirically all over the Americas that "If it’s not from the Congo, it’s from Calabar," or elsewhere in Africa.
My analysis of the ordinary everydayness of the African presence in the lives of U.S. African Americans, and of all Americans, began with my quest to understand origins and meanings that would make sense of aspects of U.S. African American culture. Experiences elsewhere in the African Diaspora led me to understand that some of these meanings are most easily perceived through the mirror of cultural forms and styles from other societies whose Africanity remains more apparent and acknowledged, and that offer perspectives that allow the sometimes more subtle Africanity of the United States to appear in higher relief.
A growing understanding of the cultural continuum from Africa to the Americas led me to an understanding of commonalities, as well as the mosaic of uniquenesses, within the African Diaspora. This evolving comparative perspective also enabled me to use this discovered Africanity of the United States to identify Africanisms elsewhere in the Diaspora, including places in which they are even more present, and simultaneously even less recognized. These Afrogenic cultural complexes often turned out to be defining elements of national cultures, hence constituents of the cultural repertoire of all Americans.
Whereas my quest was spurred by my interest in the origins of U.S. African American behaviors, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (chapter 2), literary scholar and professor of American studies and English, looks at U.S. Euro-American culture and contends that much of what has been assumed to be "white" is, in fact, not. She challenges the paradigm that has allowed the African presence to be neglected in telling the stories of who and what we all are in the United States. And she proposes a new understanding of "mainstream" U.S. culture that includes the African legacy and assumes that Euro-Americans have learned from African Americans as well as vice versa. Concerning those who continue to assert the whiteness of U.S. culture, she contends that "the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization of the United States was itself shaped from the start by people and traditions who were not white, or Anglo-Saxon, or Protestant." The demographics of the origins of the Americas clearly reinforce Fisher Fishkin’s argument, and make the opposing one seem even more untenuous.
For Fisher Fishkin, the intellectual paradigm of the scholarly denial of the extent and diversity of African and African American roles in the creation of U.S. culture is based on the same racism that has denied African Americans full rights of citizenship in the nation and that has "allowed a patently false monocultural myth to mask and distort a multicultural reality." That the whiteness of U.S. culture continues to be simply and unquestionably assumed remains part of the enduring racist logic of the society, and hence the premise of both everyday behavior and intellectual production. Fisher Fishkin cites unexpected, even sacrosanct, areas of U.S. culture, including the classic works of literary icons, in which the African presence is clearly discernable from, of course, an Afrogenic perspective.
Her discussion of the African origins of elements of U.S. popular culture, well exemplified by cartoon character Bugs Bunny, points up several dynamics concerning the nonwhite origins of an all-American figure, origins that have broader applications and implications. Bugs Bunny, as it turns out, appears to be a mainstreamized version of the African American Br’er Rabbit. Part of the hare cycle common to the West African savanna and Sahelian areas, the stories, with the hare transformed into a rabbit, retained their educational and entertaining virtues in the African American oral tradition. They were collected and put into the written tradition by white Americans who popularized them as mass culture. So the hip, jive-talking transgressive rabbit began his trajectory from black to white by coming to the Americas in the African oral tradition that was the basis of the African American oral tradition. When Br’er Rabbit was recast as Bugs Bunny and commercialized as an all-American icon, he quietly lost his "blackness" in the process, and his "whiteness" (okay, grayness) became assumed.
Like Fisher Fishkin, Brenda Dixon Gottschild (chapter 3), dance historian, critic, former professor of dance, and performer, also discusses the Africanity of another sacrosanct area of mainstream "high culture"—U.S. concert dance. Similar to Fisher Fishkin’s contention concerning the African American presence in U.S. literary classics, Dixon Gottschild asserts that the "Africanist" presence is a defining ingredient of U.S. ballet, and a characteristic that distinguishes it from its European origins and counterparts. Ironically, African Americans are still trying to become ordinary participants in concert dance troupes, as opposed to being mostly members of both well-respected and less known ethnic troupes. So their cultural presence has preceded their significant physical presence.
This seemingly contradictory situation of a defining Africanist cultural presence in the absence of a significant African American physical presence exemplifies well the "origin unknown" appropriation of Africanist culture without its Afrogenic identity, as with Bugs Bunny. But in this instance it occurs in a bastion of elite white culture, where it really is not supposed to be, as opposed to in popular culture where its presence, if recognized, comes as less of a shock. This precedence of the Afrogenic cultural presence over the Afrogenic physical presence contrasts with the situation in Argentina, for example, where the Afrogenic cultural presence remains, as Romero Rodríguez, Lucía Molina and Mario López, and I discuss, after the physical presence has almost been eliminated.
According to Dixon Gottschild, the Africanist aesthetic is readily apparent in U.S. culture to those who are aware that it exists, are interested in finding it, know how and where to look for it, and recognize it when they find it. The Africanist legacy is, she contends, an imperative, not a choice. It is rather a pervasive part of U.S. culture that all people in the nation embrace, even subliminally, whether or not they know or admit it. Most are unaware of this presence, and only a few are aware of its sources.
This pattern of forgetting, ignoring, denying, failing to see the Africanity of cultural elements that get appropriated as part of the national cultures of the Americas is a frequent theme in this volume. The Afrogenic nature of things gets "lost" as they become part of presumably white, Eurogenic, national cultures. Their African ancestry is not denied, because that would involve acknowledging the possibility of its original presence. It is rather forgotten, is quietly "disappeared," becomes "unknown," in an amnesia of former blackness, induced and enforced by authoritative voices of assumed whiteness.
It seems almost tautological to suggest, as Dixon Gottschild does, that looking from an Africanist perspective reveals the Africanist presence in American ballet. But given that this presence is assumed not to exist because of the "assumption of whiteness," the mere fact of presuming to look from an Afrogenic perspective is more revolutionary than it should logically be at this point in history, especially given the demographic construction of the Americas. The issue here, as echoed throughout this volume, is that those of us in the Americas who have not had the privilege of defining what constitutes knowledge, are suggesting that we know something special and have something new to bring to this defining, especially when discussing our own communities’ experiences. And what we have to reveal, as those who are hip to the jive have already perceived, is very often "hidden in plain view."
A Centennial Revisiting of the Double Consciousness
[T]he Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
In contrast with DuBois’s well-known tormented and disempowered concept of the "double consciousness" developed in the context of African American life at the beginning of the twentieth century, an informed and empowered sense of positive duality based on the "two-ness" of being both African American and American, each term used in both its individual national and its collective Pan-Diasporan sense, offers valuable constructs for understanding African Diasporan realities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The categories American and African American/African Diasporan are sometimes mutually exclusive and sometimes overlapping, sometimes antagonistic and sometimes complementary, but always a source of at least "two thoughts," of some kind of duality, or more likely multiplicity, of experience and/or perspective. This double or multiple consciousness, however, need no longer be a source of "unreconciled strivings." This splendid "gift" of "second sight" can, on the contrary, now function as a conscious source of both experiential and analytical riches—of simultaneously multiple, and necessarily critical, perspectives in response to the contradictions between one’s own experiences and the "revelation[s] of the other world." And the idea of being "born with a veil," according to the U.S. African American epistemology with which I am most familiar, implies the ability to see beyond the ordinary realm that others see, even to perceive different dimensions of reality, hence a gift with empowering ramifications.
To function within one’s own African Diasporan society, as well as in the larger (Pan)American society of which it is an integral and even foundational part, regularly performing both literal and metaphoric cultural code-switches, and to contemplate one’s reality from both inside and outside, sometimes simultaneously, are, in fact, elements of a core definition of what it means to be part of the African Diaspora. The concept of "African American"—again with "American" used in the most inclusive Pan-American sense—facilitates a necessary definition of a double consciousness based on African origins and African American presents and presence.
This concept considers the pervasive African/African American presence in the fabric of Pan-America, while also respecting the rich variety of these historical and present presences. African Diasporan culture(s), both in the plural singulars of distinctive national cultures, and in their common Pan-African substrata, constitute(s) a synergy of multiple African ethnic origins in dynamic interaction with the cultures of others encountered while African people were obligatorily reinventing themselves both individually and collectively as biologically and culturally new people in the new world they helped to create.
Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, having a double, or multiple, consciousness could prove to be an empowering experience, as the accomplishments of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg illustrate. Whereas some contributors to this volume are concerned with situating African Diasporan communities within, and acknowledging their contributions to, their larger national contexts, Lisa Sánchez González (chapter 7), literary critic, journalist, and professor of English, is concerned with situating a major African Diasporan intellectual in, and acknowledging his full contributions to, his plural sociocultural contexts. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile whose monumental efforts to document African Diasporan culture provided the foundation for the creation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Schomburg violated the "conspiracy of silence" that invizibilized the Africanity of important cultural figures in his quest to rediscover the erased history of people of African origin in the Americas and Europe. By bringing to light obscured information, popularizing it in his writings and public lectures, and making it available in the invaluable repository that his collection has become, Schomburg’s activities serve as an excellent prototype for the work that many contemporary African Diasporan and other scholars are continuing.
Schomburg’s inspiration to seek and gather materials on African and African Diasporan history and culture is overly familiar. A high school teacher’s response to his query about the contributions of Africans and their descendants to the history of the Americas was that they had contributed nothing. Like others of us in the past and present who have been given such dismissive and negating responses in one way or another, Schomburg decided to prove the teacher wrong and to discover Africa’s contributions to the Americas, as Molina and López, Rodríguez, and García say African Diasporan groups are currently doing in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Sánchez González notes with no astonishment, as Fisher Fishkin, Dixon Gottschild, and I also found in seeking Afrogenic culture in the Americas several generations after Schomburg, that the more Schomburg looked for information on the contributions of Africans and their descendants to the Americas and Europe, the more he discovered.
In discussing Schomburg’s accomplishments in the context of his identity as an Afro-Puerto Rican intellectual, Sánchez González critiques both Puerto Rican intellectual traditions that ignore Schomburg as Puerto Rican because of his blackness, and U.S. African American and anglophone Caribbean intellectual traditions that fail to acknowledge the significance of his Puerto Rican origins. Both communities, based on dysfunctional intra-Diasporan blinders and limiting exclusivities of identification, thus, invisibilize part of the multiply conscious transnational heritage that was the basis of Schomburg’s broad interests, extensive accomplishments, and seminal contributions to the accurate telling of the story of the Americas and the Atlantic world.
Whereas Schomburg discussed the erasure of the blackness of important figures in Puerto Rican arts and letters, who were whitened in being included in the presumably "Euro"-Caribbean cultural tradition, Sánchez González interprets the fact of Schomburg’s blackness as a tacit rationale for his not being centered in Puerto Rican intellectual traditions. The irony is that Schomburg promoted coalition-building across the lines of African Diasporan national identities, and outlined the contours of the kind of Pan-American African Diasporan consciousness that he himself exemplified, a consciousness that those who would narrow his identity have failed to understand. It is also a consciousness that has deep and firm empirical foundations in the commonalities of Pan-American African Diasporan culture, as demonstrated by the research and reflections of the contributors to this volume.
The Afrogenic double consciousness concept is especially relevant both epistemologically and hermeneutically to African Diasporan scholars who are researching our own and/or other African Diasporan communities. In our research personae we are both natives of sorts as well as scholars, scholar being a category that has until recently tended to signify the antithesis of native. We are both Diasporan insiders and academically disciplined outsiders, but outsiders much more familiar, in both the ordinary and the extended family meanings of the term, than the usual thoroughly outsider researchers have been. The insider/outsider conceptual and methodological approaches of African Diasporan scholars often involve applying the perspectives of academic disciplines to intuitions informed by the Afrogenic community knowledge, the native knowledge, of especially observant participants.
The idea of the double consciousness is also useful for highlighting the important issue of the significance of the African Diasporan native as scholar and scholar as native. Many of the contributors have begun their scholarly quests and developed their understandings based on their native knowledge and personal curiosities as members of the communities in question. To this experiential knowledge they have added academic training leading to dynamic and reciprocal interactions, rather than "warring ideals," between their roles as knowing natives and as inquiring intellectuals. Information, theories, and methods of knowing from each of these roles and positionalities challenges, nourishes, complements, and complicates the other. This was my experience in coming to an understanding of the Africanity of New Jersey.
Olly Wilson (chapter 8), musicologist, professor of music, and internationally known composer, says that his quest to discover the African conceptual basis of African American music was stimulated by what appeared to his ears to be obvious similarities between certain aspects of West African and U.S. African American musical genres. Thus it was as a participant in, as well as a scholarly researcher of, the musical culture of African America that he began to perceive these relationships. And it was as a dancer of African Diasporan sacred dances that Yvonne Daniel (chapter 23) learned the knowledge embodied in them, to which she applied her acquired anthropological perspectives to offer new insights and interpretations. Her intellectual authority for identifying and asserting the validity of an Afrogenic corporal epistemology is based on her "two thoughts," on her "second sight" in her dualistic positionality as both insider/dancer/participant, and as observant scholar.
The concept of double consciousness, in addition to such methodological implications, is also key to looking at the African foundations of African Diasporan behaviors. Wilson says that there is a distinct set of musical qualities of African origin that is expressive of the collective cultural values of people of African descent in the Americas. The essence of this tradition is a common core of conceptual approaches to the process of music-making and to the ways in which music functions in society. The manifestations of this common core are infinite, with the particular forms reflecting the peculiarities of specific African Diasporan experiences. It is about a way of doing something, not simply something that is done, similar to Dixon Gottschild’s characterization of the Africanist aesthetic as an attitude, a way of doing that permeates realms of behavior.
It was necessarily within the frameworks of meaning and belief that they brought with them that Africans in the Americas read their new environment. And it was through both the linguistic and the aesthetic languages they brought with them that they expressed these understandings. Thus, their music was formed by African cognitive assumptions and conceptual approaches to music-making—and to life in general—which were then shaped by their experiences in the Americas. It is precisely this duality, this double consciousness, Wilson says, that gives African Diasporan music its distinctive position as part of the broad fabric of shared American culture, with roots that remain fundamentally African.
In a similar vein, culinary historian and professor of English Jessica Harris (chapter 9) discusses African foods and cooking techniques that have remained not only in African Diasporan communities, but also in the national gastronomies of the Americas. Because enslaved Africans and African Americans were involved in the cultivation of food crops and were placed in charge of their enslavers’ kitchens, their foods and foodways subtly defined the tastes of the Americas, usually without acknowledgment. Additionally, privations of the U.S. Civil War introduced formerly privileged white Southerners to foods previously relegated to African Americans. These foods, Harris contends, have come to characterize "Southern cuisine," with, again, their African origins are forgotten.
Like Bugs Bunny, Southern food lost the Afrogenic identity of its creators and original consumers and was whitened for national consumption as a regional culinary tradition. I had noticed this phenomenon with gumbo, the "classic" version of which Food & Wine magazine claimed was predicated on its Eurogenic roux base, rather than on the defining African okra that gave it its origin and name. It is ironic that the South, the historic bastion of the most severe racial segregation and oppression, remains the area in which white culture is the blackest, with foodways as intimate and essential, if unacknowledged, everyday Afrogenic reminders.
African Diasporan food traditions involve both dishes whose African origins are obvious as its Bantu name proclaims for gumbo, and dishes that reflect African Diasporan gastronomic creations based on African culinary memories and the American realities of local crops and durable foods, such as salted and/or dried fish and meats, versions of which were also known in Africa, as well as the rejected innards and extremities of the animals eaten by privileged whites. Both traditions remain in African Diasporan and national gastronomies, sometimes even being touted as distinctive and defining features of the latter.
In discussing the African roots and American branches of U.S. African American material culture, John Vlach (chapter 10), anthropologist and professor of American civilization, describes how African Americans created objects based on African aesthetics, meanings, and purposes while using Euro-American techniques. Concerning the difference in importance that Euro-Americans and African Americans attribute to specific kinds of quilting patterns, for example, Vlach notes that although African Americans have been familiar with the geometric patterns preferred in Euro-American quilting, they have traditionally favored a strip style reminiscent of an aesthetic common to West African weaving. Thus, African Americans have applied African aesthetics to Euro-American production techniques to express Afrogenic meanings through Eurogenic media.
Wooden canes carved by African Americans often bore distinctive marks and adornments reflecting, Vlach says, African motifs symbolic of supernatural communication and human authority. So when an African American carved a snake or alligator on a walking stick, he may have intended and conveyed a different meaning than a similar animal carved by a white artisan. It is also quite possible, within the perspective of the Afrogenic double consciousness, that rather than these meanings being either/or, either of African or of Euro-American origin or inspiration, they were and are both/and for African Americans, who are part of both realities. Both Afrogenic and Eurogenic meanings are both real and significant, sometimes in different contexts, sometimes on different levels.
Vlach also notes that African American accomplishments in the area of material culture remain mostly unacknowledged, and are often misattributed, hence are underresearched. This observation recalls my findings concerning the misattribution of African and African American culinary, and more especially linguistic, contributions to U.S. culture. In both cases, African and African Diasporan contributions have been denied or dismissed, and Eurogenic sources substituted or prioritized, thus invisibilizing African and African Diasporan creations.
Were it not for the process of historical distortion, the fact that Africans brought knowledge and technical skills with them to the Americas would not come as such a surprise. South Carolina and Georgia Low Country planters, for example, specifically sought Africans from rice-growing regions of West Africa, who brought with them knowledge of the technology and tools of rice production and preparation. The failure to properly attribute African contributions to the material culture, hence to the knowledge-based technology of production in the Americas, although congruent with the myth cited by Joseph Harris that Africans had no knowledge or skills to bring with them, is logically, to say nothing of empirically, incongruent with the reality that Africans were brought to the Americas specifically to work. Hence they were selected for the specialized knowledge and skills that they had used to live in diverse environments in Africa, as well as for their ability to furnish manual labor.
But although they were brought to the Americas to work, Africans and the African Diasporan descendants did not just work. They also created new artistic forms in music and dance, from Argentina’s tango to the jazz of the United States that is now acknowledged as the only indigenously American classical music. And in spite of doing grueling labor and being victims of tremendous and relentless efforts to kill their spirit, they succeeded in setting the standard for celebratory aesthetic jubilance for the Americas, and increasingly for the world.
Cultural anthropologist John Stewart (chapter 11) describes the African Diaspora as the source of the globalization of a creolized African culture and aesthetic through the exporting of the exuberantly joyous Trinidadian carnival to North America, Europe, and beyond. As elsewhere in the Americas where carnival exists, Africans were initially prohibited from participating in Trinidad’s elite white event. When allowed to participate, they took it over and Africanized it. The increasingly global carnival is a contemporary expression of the sharing with a receptive global society of an emphatically Afrogenic celebratory style.
Emerging out of Trinidad’s multiethnic background, contributions from other ethnic sources were, Stewart says, grafted onto the African aesthetic and social sensibility evident in the music, dance, and overall style that remains at the core of Trinidad’s carnival. This is similar to Wilson’s assertion that there is an African aesthetic core onto which other musical influences have been grafted in the Americas. Stewart concurs with Wilson’s view of African and African Diasporan music in noting that carnival plays roles that transcend mere entertainment, bringing together the secular and sacred in what he characterizes as "a great metaphysical force."
Acknowledging Our Knowledge(s) and Telling Our Stories—In and On Our Own Terms
We wish to plead our case. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly.
This statement is from the first page of the first issue of the first African American newspaper, from March 16, 1827. Freedom’s Journal was founded by John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish in response to New York City newspapers’ negative portrayals of, and overt attacks on, the free African American community. Some white editors, for example, used their publications to encourage the (re)enslavement of New York’s free African American population.
For Africans and African Diasporans to tell our own stories, to see ourselves through our own eyes, without others as either models or authorities for defining either reality or significance, offers a corrective to the problem DuBois identified as our "looking at [our] self[selves] through the eyes of others," and our understanding ourselves through the prism of "the revelation of the other world" that "yields [us] no true self-consciousness," of, as Jesús García (chapter 17) says a century later, "seeing ourselves through borrowed eyes."
Actually, given the intellectual tradition of the Americas, this seeing might be better characterized as being through not so much "borrowed eyes" as through the "imposed eyes of others," since borrowing implies volition. Being hip to the jive involves having one’s own eyes wide open to perceive the truth through the veil of others’ mystifying and mythifying reality-negating revelations. In spite of the massive societal changes that have taken place since these words were written almost two centuries ago, contributors to this volume are still saying, "We wish to plead our case. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly."
We are also insisting upon seeing and portraying ourselves through the revelations of our own experiences and interpretations, as opposed to through the revelations of others based on their experiences and interpretations that are usually different from and sometimes antithetical to our own. And we are claiming the authority to be "voices of our own authority" speaking of and for the cultures that our communities have authored. On the basis of our dually or multiply conscious authority as both members of the communities and as scholars of these communities, we are challenging misrepresentations of them by both omission and commission.
The New York African Burial Ground Project, concerning such a significant issue as the rediscovered physical remains of African and African American ancestors, exemplifies many of the complex dynamics involved in our insistence upon telling our own stories, in this case via the stories of centuries-old Africans and African Diasporans who returned to tell theirs. Physical anthropologist Michael Blakey (chapter 12), director of the project, discusses the politics of omission and the distortions of history that were literally and metaphorically brought to light both by the discovery of New York City’s colonial African cemetery, and by the controversies generated by this discovery. These events, Blakey argues, exemplify the kinds of problems African Americans continue to face in the struggle for self-definition, with, as Fisher Fishkin and others also contend, the major theoretical problem being the fundamental Euro-American racism that distorts perceptions of African Diasporan realities.
Members of the African American descendant community had to wage a battle to gain control of the Burial Ground and to place the scientific task of reconstructing our own ancestors’ history in the hands of the leading African American research university. The locating of the project at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was made difficult by competing anthropologists at Lehman College of the City University of New York, who had taken initial possession of the African and African American ancestral remains, and whose political allies mobilized in support of their attempts to obtain the lucrative research contract to study and interpret them. Blakey notes that taking control of telling our own stories is not just an intellectual issue. It is often also about the financial value of the business of controlling definitions of reality and determinations of what constitutes valid knowledge.
The struggle to empower scientists at Howard University rather than Lehman College to interpret African and African Diasporan skeletal remains offers a striking metaphor about the continuing economic value for whites of African and African Diasporan bodies, and about the continuing African American struggle to control our destiny on various levels, including this most intimate one of controlling our bodies. The 1990s efforts to liberate historic African and African American skeletal bodies from Euro-American control seem like a contemporary rerun of nineteenth-century efforts to liberate African and African Diasporan enslaved bodies from the lucrative bondage to whites that allowed for the building of the Americas and the Atlantic world.
Whites in the 1990s had no qualms about desecrating African American graves, and had to be forced to stop by a coalition of African Americans from the community, the academy, and the city, state, and federal governments. White institutions and individuals sought to continue to violate African American bodies with impunity, further enriching themselves by using power politics to usurp the right to tell their version of the story of someone else’s ancestors.
The issue here was not just about the right to define a people, but also about the economic benefits of doing so. Had Lehman College succeeded in maintaining control over the skeletal remains of the enslaved ancestors of the African American community, the previously obscured commodified relationships of slavery in colonial New York would have been recreated in contemporary New York. Slavery-style economic relationships would seem not to have changed significantly after two centuries of history and more than a century of emancipation. It is especially interesting to note that the graves of individuals whose lives were spent creating the economic basis for the development of the city are buried, in symbolic irony, under the southern Manhattan Wall Street area that is the financial center of New York City, the United States, the Americas, and the world.
The fact that politics and community activism were so important in a scientific project points up the fact that African Diasporans must fight in various ways for access to, and control of, both the data and the right to tell our own stories with it, especially when these stories contradict official versions. But if the stories told of African Americans’ lives in and contributions to the construction of all of the Americas are not true, then the stories told about the history and present of all of the Americas are also not true.
An African sense of ancestral agency would recognize that Africans and African Americans who had not been able to tell their stories in the past had returned to tell them in the present. These ancestors would insist upon correcting the denigrating stories told about them by those who had enslaved them, benefited tremendously from their bondage, and then arrogantly denied the value of their work. They would have returned at this time to tell their stories through the contemporary voices of their descendants, who now have the scientific knowledge, and institutions with the technical capacity to enable them to do so in a plethora of highly sophisticated ways.
A symbol found on one coffin was interpreted by the Howard University team as a Sankofa representing the Akan proverb, Se wo were fi na wo sankofa a yenkyi (It is not a taboo to go back and retrieve if you forget). The symbol refers to the wisdom of using an understanding of the past in planning and preparing for the future, of recognizing the value of and seeking to learn about and from those who are now ancestors as a basis for present and future life. The team that had initially taken possession of the skeletal remains had made the facile assumption that what appeared to them to be a geometricized heart shape represented the meanings associated with the Eurogenic heart-equals-love imagery most visibly evoked on bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts, and commercialized for Valentine’s Day.
This probable misinterpretation resulting from the use of a Eurocentric cultural lens, and this trivializing of a powerful African symbol, highlight the obvious value of using an Afrogenic perspective in interpreting material remains and cultural expressions of African and African Diasporan people. Many of the people buried in the Burial Ground had been born in Africa. And given the African demographics of North America, some were very likely from the Akan-speaking area of present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire from which the Sankofa symbol comes.
Archaeologist James Denbow suggests another, Central African, interpretation of the symbol. He says concerning early twentieth-century tombstones from the Atlantic coast of the Republic of the Congo that, "Almost all of the tombstones have a heart as a central element." Noting that the shape represents a European stylistic convention introduced by missionaries who had converted Africans to Catholicism prior to the eighteenth century, he observes that "symbolic meanings associated with the heart" are "deeply embedded in Kongolese concepts of body and soul." Denbow, thus, suggests that twentieth-century Kongo people have been utilizing a European symbol, modified and adapted to Kongo thoughts and needs, to make visual a concept profoundly rooted in their own culture. And he quotes a Kongo man as saying, "The heart rules the entire being. It is the center of all information and instruction. . . . The heart also stores up the memories of all past experience and gives man the power of action."
There is a congruity between the West African Akan and Central African Kongo interpretations of the symbol. People from various areas of Africa met in the Americas and forged new identities based on commonalities they discovered. The idea that "the heart stores up memories of past experience and gives man the power of action," leads to using an understanding of the past as the basis for building the future. So, the heart-shaped symbol may have been intended to represent a Sankofa, or the similar meanings the Kongo associated with the heart, or/and something else that has not yet been suggested from elsewhere in Africa. Thus, one might reasonably presume that Africans would have used a familiar and meaningful African symbol, or that if they used a Eurogenic symbol, it would represent African meanings in as significant a context as a burial site for the transition of their loved ones to the status of revered ancestors. The Howard University researchers had a sense of both the Afrogenic and the Eurogenic interpretations of the symbol, as well as of their relative explanatory values.
In the context of the African Burial Ground, the Sankofa may be understood as referring symbolically to the fact that the literal and figurative coming to light of the historic ancestral remains offered the opportunity to learn from their scientific analysis something about how these Africans and African Americans had lived, and the roles they had played in the building of the City of New York. Their existence, their stories, and their contributions had been "forgotten," invisibilized, literally buried under the physical constructions, and the intellectual construction, of the modern city for which they helped create, and of which they continue to literally help constitute, the foundation.
The coming to light of this covered-up aspect of U.S. African American history, and of U.S. history, is symbolic of the larger issue of the both real and symbolic uncovering/discovering of the African Diasporan presence in the foundations of the societies of the Americas. What was figuratively uncovered with the literal uncovering of the ancestral skeletal remains was the metaphoric cover-up of the African/African Diasporan role in the creation of New York. If Africans and African Diasporans contributed little or nothing to the construction of New York City, the United States, the Americas, the Atlantic world, and global civilization, as has been systematically claimed and taught, the implication is that having contributed little, they/we are not entitled to much.
The retelling of the story of New York such that the presence and contributions of the individuals interred in the Burial Ground are included in the historical patrimony of the city should situate African Americans as rightful heirs to that legacy. If our ancestors did, however, participate in the building of the city, the nation, the Americas, the Atlantic world, and global civilization, then we their descendants should be entitled to benefit from the fruits of their labors.
The idea that Africans and African Diasporans may have contributed little or nothing is a logical and empirical contradiction in the context of enslavement. The implication is that the only human group whose presence and raison d’être in the Americas was predicated solely on their role as a labor force, as Curtin noted in describing piezas de India as units of labor rather than as individual human beings, did not do the work that they were often violently obliged to do in building the societies of Pan-America.
The process for African Diasporans of telling our own stories requires such a struggle because doing so involves changing the versions of the past and present of the Americas that others had an interest in fabricating and have an interest in maintaining. A story of newly American African efforts to speak for themselves in the context of contemporary museum representations exemplifies this point. Cultural anthropologist Diana Baird N’Diaye (chapter 13) discusses the politics of representation as manifest in the Smithsonian Institution’s African Immigrant Folklife Study Project, which she founded and directs. The goals of the project were for researchers from Washington D.C.–area African immigrant communities to study and share with the public ways in which their communities are preserving and transforming their lifestyles and creating new senses of community, culture, and identity in the United States. N’Diaye’s experiences demonstrate the nature of the power relations involved in Africans’ claiming the authority to represent and define themselves in the contemporary United States, and the right to determine what constitutes relevant and legitimate knowledge about their communities and who possesses it.
This new African presence in the United States represents a contemporary example of Joseph Harris’s (chapter 4) description of the continuing global African Diaspora. Like people involved in the initial involuntary Diaspora to the Americas, members of this contemporary Diaspora are, albeit in much more volitional and favorable circumstances, also reinventing Afrogenic institutions and behaviors in a context that lacks many familiar things, makes many different demands, and offers many new resources and possibilities. This most recent African Diaspora further complicates the definition of African American and offers another take on the DuBoisian double consciousness by adding the actively transnational duality of those who are now both African and American.
Although the success of the project led her to downplay the obstacles, N’Diaye acknowledges that it was difficult to fund the project through the usual sources. The researchers, respected African-born culture bearers and scholars, brought to the project insider knowledge of the dominant discourses about their evolving identities and cultures, and knowledge of subtleties of practice and meaning unavailable to outsider scholars with which to determine which aspects of their communities to document and how to interpret them. In spite of academia’s current claims of respect for the authority of "native voices," she notes, potential funders focused on the absence of the usual academically sanctioned "experts" and challenged the ability of African immigrant community members to research their own cultures seriously. Although some participants were credentialed scholars, the reviewers were unfamiliar with them, so apparently did not consider their presence the kind of intellectual authority they were seeking.
Reciprocally, African immigrant community members complained about the ways in which Africa had been represented in Smithsonian exhibits, did not believe in the possibility of an authentic partnership, and were suspicious of the intentions of the institution. The project gained community trust through the production of programs and publications accurately reflecting African immigrant voices. Similar to the New York African Burial Ground Project, the African immigrant project was sustained largely because mainly African Americans in key positions insisted upon including the authoritative voices of the African community in telling their own stories.
The work of linguist Olabiyi Yai (chapter 14), ambassador to UNESCO from the Republic of Benin, on historic concepts of African nations in the Americas, complements N’Diaye’s contemporary analysis by shedding comparative light on common Afrogenic conceptual foundations in the creation of past and present Diasporan African communities and identities. Yai’s analysis also highlights the special value of studies of the African Diaspora by scholars from African societies that have established a transatlantic presence in the Americas. His intimate native, and disciplined scholarly, knowledge of the African roots of African Diasporan practices gives him an especially valuable style of Afrogenic perspective in interpreting them. His form of double consciousness as related to the African Diaspora offers a privileged example of Dixon Gottschild’s suggestion to reverse the perspective and look at the Americas through an Africanist light.
Yai’s African(ist) perspective, an essential complement to African Diasporan perspectives, allows him to discover meanings and principles in the Diaspora of which members and scholars of these societies, lacking his broad experiential knowledge of the African roots of Diasporan phenomena, are unaware. Like the African immigrant researchers in Washington, he has an insider’s "knowledge of subtleties of practice and meaning" not only "unavailable to outsider scholars," but sometimes also unknown to practitioners because of their historical distance from the origins of their practices.
Yai notes that some historians claim that it was enslavers who organized Africans into separate nations based on their ethnicities or regions of origin in a divide-and-rule strategy. This perspective assumes an absence of African agency in creating for themselves spaces of relative freedom. Allowed time for entertainment and Christian instruction in the context of the nation structures, Africans, Yai contends, reinvented Afrogenic institutions and practices cloaked in Eurogenic garb.
To maintain and (re)create as much culture as they did, Africans clearly had to use multiple techniques of camouflage and dissimulation. They had to be, and the results prove that they were, both hip and jive. This dissimulative resistance to imposed assimilationist efforts by appearing to conform on the level of visible behaviors, but with different intentions, meanings, and goals from those intended by their enslavers, is similar to Vlach’s discussion of African foundations and meanings in African American material culture. All over the Americas Africans and their descendants who were hip to the jive cloaked African and African Diasporan meanings in Eurogenic garb, jiving those they intended to deceive into believing they had really acquiesced to their jive.
Depending on one’s focus, one may highlight either the imposed Eurogenic meanings or the deep structural Afrogenic meanings of the same phenomena, such as with the interpretations of the nations. Given my discovery that Afrogenic meanings offer the only convincing explanations for African Diasporan behaviors in twentieth-century New Jersey almost two centuries after the end of the legal importation of Africans to the United States, I have to assume that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Africans were arriving regularly from the continent and were continually infusing African Diasporan societies with new information and inspiration from old traditions, the meanings of African Diasporan behaviors were significantly more Afrogenic than Eurogenic.
The macrolevel of belonging to recreated African nations in the Americas based on notions of plural citizenships remembered from Africa that Yai discusses, is similar to the multiple belonging of both Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and of the dynamically transnational new Diasporan Africans whom N’Diaye describes. In contrast, social anthropologist Patricia Guthrie (chapter 16) discusses a microsocietal level of (re)creating a sense of individual belonging that was designed to allow each person a place in the disrupted and reorganized situation of enslavement.
Enslaved Africans and African Americans were very often deprived of consanguine family ties and were obliged to develop new forms of social organization to recreate a sense of personhood and community. Guthrie describes a social institution developed during slavery by which everyone could be integrated into reinvented communities and given a role and sense of belonging. On St. Helena Island in the South Carolina Sea Islands, such an institution was "catching sense," the process by which children were provided with a human network and an eventual place in the adult social community. Similar to Yai’s analysis of the concept of the nation in Africa and the African Diaspora, with the institution of catching sense what mattered was not simply a person’s condition or place of birth, but rather values associated with and acquired in that place.
Musician, artist, and researcher Tomás Olivera Chirimini (chapter 15) is the cultural director of Montevideo’s oldest Afro-Uruguayan organization, the Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguaya Negra (ACSUN), and the founder and artistic director of the Conjunto Bantú, a performance group that reenacts traditional Afro-Uruguayan pageantry. He analyses the evolution of the candombe, the core Afro-Uruguayan cultural complex that constitutes a major contribution to Uruguay’s national identity. Candombe originally designated the music, dance, instrumentation, and locales of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social events of reconstituted African nations in Uruguay. In these nations, which Yai discusses in a Pan-American context, Africans of similar origins recreated a sense of identity and community based on old principles and new realities. Although ceasing to exist as such with the demise of the African-born population at the end of the nineteenth century, the African nations and the candombe have continued to reinvent themselves in new guises based on old foundations and new realities.
Candombe became a source of inspiration for artistic representation in painting, in popular and classical music and dance, and in the Uruguayan carnival. Candombe also became the foundation of contemporary Afro-Uruguayan self-expression and the key element of the national cultural identity by which Uruguayans celebrate their uniqueness. Thus, the presumably nonexistent Afro-Uruguayan population, which has always been hypervisible in cultural production, maintains obvious continuities of Afrogenic culture in a society that proclaims its European heritage, while characterizing itself by its African heritage.
In and On Our Own Terms
The desire to and insistence upon telling our stories both in and on our own terms is part of a contemporary Pan-American African Diasporan dynamic. Where we look for information, which information is considered useful and valid, and who makes these determinations for what purposes are crucial issues. Also significant are the terms on which we understand and interpret the data, and the terms in which we tell the stories. Innovative sources of revisionist information can be found in old oral traditions, in new readings of old archives, in new understandings of old ways of structuring and characterizing experience, and in new definitions of kinds and sources of knowledge, some of which may be ancestral.
Jesús García (chapter 17), author, musician, filmmaker, and general coordinator of the Fundación AfroAmérica, is concerned with demystifying the absence of the African presence in the construction of the Venezuelan national identity. He is also concerned with the Eurocentric nature of the historical discourse taught in Venezuelan schools, which leads, among other negative results, to internalized negative self-perceptions among Afro-Venezuelans. Fortunately for García’s worldview, the elders in his Afro-Venezuelan town told him a different story from that told in the schools, one featuring Afro-Venezuelans in tales, songs, and poetry. Everyday life provided him with an alternative vision and an antidote to the official version of Venezuelan history.
As in Venezuela, all over the Americas members of the African Diaspora, like all other Americans, have been systematically (mis)educated to see Africa as savage and ahistorical based on the kinds of myths evoked by Joseph Harris. These systematically inculcated (mis)perceptions have inclined African Diasporans not to want to identify with such a problematic past, and to underestimate their ancestors’ participation in the development of the Americas. This miseducation continues in both compulsory formal education and in the much more influential informal mass education with which we are bombarded by the media. I called the results of a study I did of films on Africa used in U.S. schools, "Tarzan in the Classroom: How ‘Educational’ Films Mythologize Africa and Miseducate Americans."
García sought to resolve the contradiction between the national version of Venezuelan history and that of his elders by going to the same archival sources from which the official version came. There he found that the same national archives in which the exclusionary definers of the official history had found only part of the story, also contained the data for telling the rest of the story. Historical documents corroborated his community’s oral traditions about the Afro-Venezuelan presence, and contradicted official stories that ignored or misrepresented this presence.
García’s experience clearly demonstrates Inikori’s and Dixon Gottschild’s contention that the theory one seeks to prove and the worldview one seeks to support determine the data one chooses to look for, notice, declare significant, and use to prove one’s points. He found an important African presence "hidden in plain view" in the same official sources used by those who told the story of Venezuela as if Africans had not been significant actors in the history of the nation.
On a visit to the African Burial Ground’s Office of Public Education and Interpretation, I learned that public educator and researcher Marie-Alice Devieux had had a parallel experience at the New York Historical Society. When she told a white researcher there that she was seeking documentation of the enslaved African/African American presence in colonial New York, the man, who had been working for four months with documents from the period that interested her, assured her that there had been few Africans/African Americans in New York at the time, and that most of them had been free. At the end of the day the man came to her with a pile of documents referring to the large enslaved African/African American presence in colonial New York. With "an incredulous look on his face," he told her that he had never "seen" that information before.
In searching for evidence of the moral and political contributions of Afro-Venezuelans to the national concept of and struggle for independence, García found declarations of African and Afro-Venezuelan maroons who had been captured and tortured for seeking freedom from bondage. Such discoveries led him to critique theories positing that the freedom-seeking aspirations of Afro-Venezuelans were, rather than evidence of their own desire for freedom, in fact inspired by the French Revolution, a thesis upheld by presumably credible Venezuelan scholars. To the contrary, based on his archival research García contends that Afro-Venezuelan and other African Diasporan quests for freedom, as expressed, for example, in the creation of autonomous maroon communities, many of which predated the 1789 French Revolution, should be understood as models for American independence movements. Based on such Pan-American realities, he urges a study of comparative marooning and its impact on the construction of ideas of national independence in the Americas.
The Eurocentric idea that such movements were modeled on the French Revolution is part of the pervasive tendency of imposing inaccurate origins on African Diasporan phenomena, and in this case attributing the inspiration for Afrogenic freedom-seeking to a European phenomenon that had not yet occurred. García’s exhortation is especially significant when related to the acknowledgment in the United States that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American abolitionist and civil rights struggles served as the impetus and models for other sectors of the population to seek their own greater freedom and increased rights.
White women’s involvement in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement preceded their seeking greater rights for themselves through the women’s suffrage movement. And the mid-twentieth-century African American civil rights and Black liberation movements led to the women’s liberation movement, to senior citizens’ rights movements such as the Gray Panthers, whose name, albeit with much less militant implications, was copied from the Black Panthers, as well as to the assertions of the rights of other ethnic and self-identified groups. It should not be so difficult to imagine that the most unfree people in the Americas, on the basis of whose bondage the Americas were predicated, should be those people most inclined to fight for their freedom. Nor should it come as a surprise that their freedom struggles should serve as models for others, including those whose privilege was based on their subjugation.
Similarly, geologist Gilberto Leal (chapter 18), a founder of the Conselho Nacional de Entidades Negras (the National Council of Black Organizations), and coordinator of the Bahian politico-cultural organization Núcleo Cultural Níger-Okàn (Níger-Okàn Cultural Center), provides a retelling of Brazilian history that foregrounds Afro-Brazilian activism and resistance, and challenges the still-alive scholarly, and uncritical popular vision of Brazil as a "racial democracy." Those who are hip to the jive characterize this perspective as Brazil’s "exquisite myth." Brazilian history was, Leal states, marked by frequent revolts against the violence of the slavocratic system, in flagrant contrast to the national myth of a benign system of slavery passively accepted by the enslaved. Official history has invisibilized this heroic aspect of Afro-Brazilian history by misrepresenting Afro-Brazilian resistance to oppression as banditry rather than as freedom-fighting.
Like García, Leal posits the freedom struggles of enslaved African Diasporans as models for national independence movements, and presents African and Afro-Brazilian active resistance to enslavement as the forerunner of and prototype for Brazil’s quest for independence from Portuguese colonialism. He asserts that the seventeenth-century Quilombo of Palmares represented the first successful act of resistance against colonial control in Brazil, and that Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares, whose heroism Afro-Brazilians commemorate annually, should be considered a national hero of Brazil’s independence.
Leal also illustrates Inikori’s claims concerning the African role in the economic development of the Atlantic basin by discussing the omission in Brazil’s official history of acknowledgment of the fundamental Afro-Brazilian role as the unremunerated labor force in the sugar, coffee, and mining industries that created the wealth of the nation. In line with Inikori’s contention that the modern economies of the Atlantic world were based on enslaved African labor in the Americas, Leal asserts that the modern industrial nation of Brazil was built by Afro-Brazilians.
Brazilian historian João Reis (chapter 19) supports Leal’s contentions concerning Afro-Brazilian resistance to enslavement by documenting the fact that uprisings of enslaved people and the creation of maroon communities were common all over the country throughout the history of Brazilian slavery. While acknowledging that inspirations for revolts came from various sources internal and external to Afro-Brazilian and Brazilian society, Reis alludes to links between and influences from intra-Diasporan contacts in noting that the effect of the 1804 Haitian revolution, known in Brazil as haitianismo, was a major inspiration for freedom-seeking Afro-Brazilians, and that the 1835 Revolt of the Malês in Bahia was a source of good news reported in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in New York City.
The issue of resistance to enslavement among African Diasporans is obviously a very important issue because it is a key demonstration of agency and accomplishment. The acknowledgment of such agency creates an intellectual problem when the goal of a system is to disempower a people, enslavement representing the ultimate disempowerment. Demonstrations of agency and accomplishment have to be denied through dissimulatory intellectual tactics of nonacknowledgment, distortion of meaning, logic-defying interpretations, and misattribution.
Once the system of American slavery, predicated on the disempowerment of people of African descent, was in place, it became intellectually impossible to acknowledge something so contradictory as the premise that struggles for freedom among presumably powerless enslaved people could have inspired struggles for freedom from colonialism, in the form of national independence movements, among their enslavers. It is noteworthy that the acknowledgment of the African American freedom quest as a model for others in the United States is limited to other relatively disenfranchised groups, such as women and the elderly, and not extended to the national quest for independence that is part of the heroic formative story of the nation.
The Quilombo of Palmares is documented to have existed and to have resisted frequent attacks between 1605 and 1695. So the Palmares maroons were defending their autonomous community against colonial armies more than a century before both the French Revolution in 1789 and Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822. The Haitian revolution that encouraged Afro-Brazilian freedom quests also preceded Brazil independence and served as an important inspiration for Spanish-speaking American independence movements. Hence, Palmares’ autonomy from Portuguese colonial rule predated all American independences. The historical data suggest that principles of freedom and independence so important to the American republics just may have been inspired by resistant quests for freedom on the parts of the very people whose lack of freedom the rulers and elites of these societies sought to perpetuate.
Romero Rodríguez (chapter 20), journalist, government advisor, and director general of Organizaciones Mundo Afro, a national federation of Afro-Uruguayan institutions, created the Red de Organizaciones Afro-Americanas (Network of Afro-American Organizations) to develop links and stimulate collaboration between Pan-American African Diasporan organizations. The network is an excellent example of the kind of transnational coalition-building with the goal of creating a Pan-American African Diasporan consciousness advocated by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Rodríguez illustrates ways in which African Diasporan populations of South America’s Southern Cone are reclaiming their Afrogenic heritages to counteract the alienating effects of assimilationist cultural politics, and are affirming their distinctive identities and highlighting their significant roles in their national histories and cultures.
Afro-Bolivians are basing their newly rediscovered sense of identity around the Afrogenic musical and dance form saya, which had been disappearing as a result of their increasing assimilation into the larger society. And they are using that cultural rallying point as a basis for both the recovery of their oral history, often transmitted in saya lyrics, and for promoting community development. Afro-Paraguayans of Uruguayan origin continue to use the Afrogenic music and dance form candombe, discussed by Olivera Chirimini (chapter 15), in venerating their Afro-Catholic patron saint, and use this symbol of their collective identity as a basis of the group solidarity manifest in their fight to secure community land rights.
Afro-Argentineans, who now exist in small and dispersed numbers, have also organized themselves to affirm their presence, identify and assert their contributions to Argentinean culture, and reclaim cultural spaces from which their ancestors were historically "disappeared." Unlike what is hidden in plain view, Afro-Argentineans vanished from public consciousness while remaining in full sight, albeit in diminished numbers. And Afro-Uruguayans, after suffering the physical destruction of their communities at the hands of a military government, are working not only on reclaiming their cultural heritage and asserting their significant role in the formation of Uruguay’s national identity, but also on organizing and collaborating with other African Diasporan groups toward similar ends.
Although these groups have been integrally involved in the creation of their nations and have been important sources of economic development, military cannon fodder, and culture trivializingly characterized as "folklore," the significant change is that now, rather than downplaying their distinctiveness in seeking to assimilate, they are affirming and promoting their unique cultural forms and claiming their self-defined place within their national cultures. They are, thus, insisting upon being subjects of their own Afrogenic stories rather than objects of the Eurogenic (mis)representations of others. And, they are asserting the right to (re)present themselves, for the benefit of their communities’ interests, in and on their own terms.
In this vein, Lucía Molina and Mario López (chapter 21), founders of the Casa de la Cultura Indo-Afro-Americana in Santa Fe, Argentina, tell their version of the story of Argentina, providing an analysis of the systematic socioeconomic oppression and frequent military decimation, as well as of the intellectual gymnastics involved in "disappearing" the formerly numerous Afro-Argentinean population. The Afro-Argentinean presence became a source of cognitive dissonance in a society determined to define itself as European and to declare itself "white," in spite of a demographic and cultural history of a significant African presence that had to be very deliberately "forgotten." A recent Washington Times article says that, "Argentines have a reputation today for a superiority complex sometimes tinged with a sense of satisfaction that their country is not home to a large nonwhite population, as is most of the rest of the rest of Latin America. . . . But the racial smugness is founded on a whitewashed history."
Molina and López demonstrate that Africans and their descendants were present and playing active roles in important numbers during the formative period of the development of the Argentinean nation, and that they continue to exist dynamically and visibly while being declared officially absent. They also detail the intellectual context and content of this process of "disappearing," and its effects on both the Afro-Argentinean population that tried to "whiten" itself to conform to its supposed nonexistence, and on the larger population that continues to misrepresent itself to itself and to others by denying a significant aspect of its composition and evolution. Beyond the simple assumption of whiteness identified by Fisher Fishkin for the United States, and the absence of acknowledgment of the Afro-Venezuelan presence highlighted by García, Afro-Argentineans were, Molina and López argue, consciously and system(at)ically invisibilized while remaining visible, and were "disappeared" while continuing to appear, by substituting desire for reality in a society for which the concept of "disappearing" people became a morbid cliché.
The insistence of these communities upon correcting the historical record to accurately reflect the presence and contributions of their ancestors to the formation of the nation, and correcting the present record to accurately reflect their own continuing participation in nations that must be accurately defined as multiethnic, has pragmatic as well as intellectual goals related to issues of socioeconomic development. Documenting an historical presence can prove useful in questions of land tenure, a pressing issue in several African Diasporan communities. Insisting on being acknowledged as having a distinctive identity and on being counted as such in national censuses can provide a basis for making demands on public institutions and for obtaining support from national and international institutions for community development projects. And asserting the necessity of having their stories accurately told as an integral part of the official story of the nation through the educational process can help these communities internalize a sense of positive self-esteem and entitlement with which to fuel their struggles for equal rights and equitable participation in all areas of contemporary society.
Afro-Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando (chapter 22) highlights the importance of collecting and documenting, before it is too late, knowledge maintained in the oral traditions of African Diasporan communities. Afro-Cuban elders who drum, sing, and dance in the Yoruba and other African religious traditions recreated in Cuba are, she says, Caribbean griots, oral historians whom some would denigrate by characterizing them as performers of "folklore." Her exhortation to document and preserve their wisdom responds to the often-quoted statement by the distinguished Malian champion of the oral tradition, historian and diplomat Amadou Hampâté Bâ, that, "Each old person who dies in Africa is like a library that is burned." This idea is also applicable to the African Diaspora in this still-pioneering era of data-gathering, as Rolando notes in saying that, like the Sankofa concept, "We have to return to the past to see what remains in the present."
Rolando also discusses her documentation of other African Diasporas subsequent to the transatlantic one, internal dispersions such as those in which Haitians, Jamaicans, and Barbadians arrived in eastern Cuba as a result of the sugarcane boom, in an economic migration that made more complex the ethnocultural composition of the island. She makes the point, similar to N’Diaye concerning the United States, that the African Diaspora continues within the Americas, creating further layering in a continuing dynamic of intradiasporan encounters and increasingly multiple consciousnesses.
And cultural anthropologist, dancer, and dance scholar and teacher Yvonne Daniel (chapter 23) ends the volume by going even further than those contributors who want the knowledge of African Diasporan culture-bearers to be included in the Pan-American discourse. Daniel argues for the recognition of a whole different way of knowing, an "embodied knowledge," a profoundly Afrogenic epistemological and hermeneutical system codified in the religious dances that celebrate the divine beings of African America. She characterizes the knowledge embodied in religious dance as another way, kind, and source of knowing the universe. This is a valid form of knowledge, she argues, echoing Wilson, Stewart, and Rolando, that needs to be recognized as such rather than devalued as mere entertainment.
Daniel, thus, takes the idea of the very necessary epistemological and hermeneutical overhaul proposed by Yai to a new level by asserting that it is not just the intellect, but rather the entire dancing body, that is the repository of Afrogenic knowledge. She argues for a new level of perceiving and understanding of something that is seen and discussed, but not on its own terms. It is not acknowledged for all that it signifies because of the application of inapplicable premises that obscure deep meanings in favor of trivializing interpretations.
From the perspective of Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the knowledge that Daniel says is embodied in dance may be considered libraries lost with the demise of each knowledgeable dancer. In this case, the library is the corpus of dancing bodies. Daniel, in fact, characterizes the dancers and singers whom Rolando thinks of as griots as African Diasporan archivists.
A dancer as well as an anthropologist and a member of an African Diasporan community that dances—all the roles one plays determining how one sees, moves in, and gathers data and theorizes about the world—Daniel challenges the limited kinds of knowledge and limited ways of accessing knowledge that have been considered reliable and important by scholars. Like Dixon Gottschild, she questions who can decide what is and is not valid knowledge and by which criteria. From multiply conscious perspectives, she questions the limited and limiting definitions and categorizations of the kinds of knowledge recognized by those who have claimed the power and authority to hegemonically define such issues. And she offers dance performance and its analysis as a privileged method—and a method clearly privileged by the African and African Diasporan cultures whose spiritual beings have selected dance as their preferred style of expression and communication—for really knowing these cultural systems.
In advocating dance as a methodology for knowing, Daniel asserts that without the deep knowledge that comes from participatory immersion, in combination with the study of institutions and social interactions, researchers cannot really understand African Diasporan ritual communities in which dance is such an essential form of expression. In essence, cultural blinders premised on the sensory limitations firmly encoded into academic styles of knowing inherently limit the ability to know by allowing only partial tools for making sense of holistic systems of human knowledge.
Africans and African Diasporans and our spiritual beings have defined music and dance as a profound style of expression of the divine essential to the functioning of the universe, representing the most fundamental principles of the cosmic system, and a privileged form of communication between humans and the divine. Yet this same behavior has been denigrated from a Eurogenic perspective, rather than respected as Afrogenic wisdom imparted by sages about the most important aspects of life. This situation exemplifies well the problem of failing to take seriously what a culture is conveying about itself, about its premises, its priorities, and its serious everyday concerns, in and on its own terms. Failing to acknowledge this reality, and imposing an exogenic perspective rather than accepting what the endogenic perspective is communicating, precludes understanding the culture in and on the terms by which it understands itself and presents itself to the world.
African Diasporan Pan-American Puzzles
The contributions of Africans and their descendants to Pan-American life are so central and foundational that there is no way of discussing the Americas accurately and honestly without considering them. They were part of the agriculture that allowed the voluntary European and involuntary African immigrants to survive. They were part of the technology that allowed everyone to work and create. They were part of the economy that allowed the societies to develop and expand. They were part of the creation of the languages in which everyone learned to communicate. They were part of the definition of the nature of the spiritual, and of how to access and relate to it. They were part of the creation of all of the myriad cultural systems, forms, and styles in which all African and European immigrant Americans organized themselves and expressed their identities.
Africans and their descendents waged the struggles necessary to free themselves from their enslavers and participated actively in the battles to free their enslavers from their European colonial rulers. Hence they were a formative part of the very definition of freedom and justice in the Americas. And although they were brought to the Americas only to work, and worked de sol a sol (from "kin to cain’t"), they also taught the Americas how to celebrate life.
From the beginning of the European invasion and conquest of Native American territory, Europeans brought along Africans who, albeit involuntarily, participated integrally in the creation of the Americas with: their dominant demographic presence, and economic contributions, their specialized knowledge and skills, their enduring principles and attitudes, their influential tastes and preferences, and their profound understanding of life and insistence upon living it as joyously as possible. As foundational constituents of all of the societies of the Americas—although as unequal constituents who worked much more and benefited much less than Euro-Americans—they helped determine the basic forms these societies have taken and the ways in which they function today.
To understand the Americas it is, therefore, necessary to assume and acknowledge that these African contributions are part of their deep structure; and that as such they continue to express themselves in many ways seen and unseen, named and unnamed, somewhat known and mostly still to be known. This volume offers the beginning of an antidote to the inherently incomplete Eurocentric version of the Pan-American story.
The volume represents a fundamental challenge to the way in which the story of the Americas has been told, as if Africans and their descendants had not been the basis of the labor that made the development of both the Americas and Western Europe possible, and as if much of the cultural repertoire of everyone in the Americas were not of African/African Diasporan origin. The African and African Diasporan scholars and politico-cultural leaders and other conscientious scholars represented here offer new data about the African Diaspora from Buenos Aires to New York City, data from old sources such as new readings of historical documents, and data from unexpected sources such as the lives of long-deceased individuals. They also offer new perspectives on old sources of knowledge such as everyday language and the knowledge encoded in dance. And they uncover the Afrogenic nature of much culture unquestioningly assumed to be Eurogenic, such as U.S. canonical literature and elite concert dance. They, in essence, contradict and correct much of the prevailing story of the Americas.
This volume also represents the beginning of a comparative analysis of African Diasporan societies and phenomena from an Afrogenic perspective that focuses on African and African Diasporan agency, participation, and contributions. It represents a beginning of an attempt to respond to what might reasonably be considered the fundamental problem in the real understanding of the Americas. That problem, which is the result of an apparently deliberate distortion of the portrayal of historical reality in order to justify an unconscionable social system, is that of acknowledging the role of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the creation of the Americas.
Such an acknowledgment involves confronting the intellectual tradition/contradiction of justifying how good Christians could treat other humans in the inhuman ways that history makes obvious, while at the same time pretending to create democratic republics. A flagrant example of this fundamental contradiction was defining human beings not as people but as chattel like pigs and cows, or as pieces of ebony, and claiming that they were uncivilized, while simultaneously "recruiting" these very same people specifically for their sophisticated technological knowledge in such fundamental survival areas as agriculture and mining, putting them in charge of growing and preparing food, and even entrusting them with the responsibility of taking care of the privileged children of their enslavers.
African American historian John Henrik Clarke said, "You cannot subjugate a man and recognize his humanity, his history and his personality. Europeans and Euro-Americans subjugated Africans and their descendants and denied their/our humanity, history, and personality. Denial, however, does not make things go away, even if it may intellectually exclude or obscure problematic presences. Such denial rather obliges the deniers to lie, to dissimulate, about the presence of the subject of the denial in a variety of ways, such as "origin unknown," with or without Eurocentric misattribution. It requires imaginative styles of erasure and invisibilization such as writing African and African Diasporan subjects of denial out of selected parts of the story by simply whiting us out.
The dispersal of African people and culture throughout the Americas, the meetings of Africans with other peoples, and African adaptations of their original knowledge and behaviors to different natural and human environments, have created multiple refractions of Afrogenic culture. The purpose of this volume is also to look at this Pan-American Afrogenic culture holistically and comparatively, demonstrating African continuity and American creativity, and highlighting commonalities and uniquenesses.
An important goal is to see ourselves, and to allow others to see us, through our own eyes, through the reflection of our own self-consciousness, rather than through either borrowed or imposed eyes. We endeavor to present ourselves in and on our own terms so as to allow ourselves and others to understand us from our multiple endogenic perspectives, rather than as filtered through the perspectives of inapplicable exogenic premises that distort our realities. Our Afrogenic perspectives offer both correctives and opportunities to become hip to jive scholarly and popular traditions that have propagated a story of the Pan-American African Diaspora that does not either conform to empirical reality or do justice to the much more complex story of the Americas.
As a result of my experiences and research, I have come to view the African Diaspora in the Americas as a vast, multidimensional puzzle in which some of the pieces were brought from Africa and have maintained recognizable identities, and other pieces were created in the Americas based on Afrogenic conceptual foundations. In this volume we see these two fundamental principles demonstrated in struggles for freedom and independence, in concepts of knowledge, in social organization and its philosophical bases, in technology and material culture, in gastronomy, in language, in music and dance, and in celebration.
My quest has been to seek out and identify these puzzle pieces, to figure out how they fit together, and to imagine how the resultant pictures might look. The chapters in this volume represent a step toward finding these pieces, figuring out the principles by which they are to be assembled, and assembling them to see some of the local, national, and international pictures that they compose. These principles of assembly are the common conceptual structures underlying variegated surface manifestations. There are obviously many more pieces to be sought and found, many more principles of assembly to be identified or figured out, and many more pictures to be seen.
To understand the African Diaspora it is necessary to seek, discover, recognize, identify, and properly interpret puzzle pieces that we have not known how to see, or have been told not to seek, so have not sought to find. We have not known how to see them because their presence has been obscured by authoritative assertions and unquestioned assumptions of their nonexistence. And even if these puzzle pieces have been perceived as in some way distinctive, meaningful interpretations have not been readily available in prevailing explanatory systems. Once these puzzle pieces are acknowledged to exist, seeing and distinguishing them and understanding their sometimes plural meanings and complex implications can be facilitated by the double/multiple consciousness of an Afrogenic perspective.
African Diasporan cultures and contributions to their national cultures have been misrepresented throughout the Americas in various ways. Afro-Uruguayans, who have been overrepresented in public culture since the eighteenth century, and who have contributed to the national culture the ingredient by which Uruguay celebrates its uniqueness, have simply been claimed not to exist. The presence of as much Afrogenic culture as has been identified in everyday all-American life, in popular culture and even in "high" culture in the United States, a society in which African American culture, if it existed at all, was authoritatively defined as a pathological version of Euro-American culture, is bound to come as a surprise to practically everyone.
And there are still denials and distortions even in societies in which Afrogenic culture is commonly acknowledged as existing in religion, music, and dance, as in Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela. Behaviors that might be respected as sources of important philosophical concepts are not usually acknowledged for their seriousness, and African Diasporan contributions to issues of national values and principles, and to heroic behaviors in defense of them as manifest, for example, in the quest for freedom, justice, and independence, have been misrepresented and misattributed.
It is not clear whether it is more deleterious to be told that you do not exist, as was the case for the Afro-Uruguayans, or not to have your existence doubted, but rather to have it declared originless and pathological, as in the United States. Both this nonexistence and this pathology were claimed in contradictory situations in which the cultural creations of the communities that did not exist, or were pathological, were simultaneously appropriated by the same segments of the society that made these negative determinations.
Such inherent contradictions result from the fundamentally jive nature of the authoritative story told of the Americas. Complex intellectual gymnastics are required to make such an empirically problematic story seem coherent. Our goal in this volume is to help correct these misrepresentations and to help tell the story of the Americas honestly—by accurately including the excluded but historically, demographically, and culturally not only present but essential African-descended population.
The comparative study of African Diasporan societies and their roles in their nations, in addition to demonstrating similar patterns of misrepresentation, also highlights significant commonalities in both sociocultural forms and in the underlying principles that give them meaning. Looking at one African Diasporan society through the light of a principle understood from another, as some of the contributors do, and as others provide the theoretical and/or empirical bases for doing, is especially illuminating. That several contributors have independently made similar and complementary discoveries supports the point. García’s conceptualization in African terms of an Afro-Venezuelan culture of resistance reinforced my understanding of the resistant survival linguistic complex expressed in African terms that I identified in New Jersey. And both analyses conform to Yai’s exhortation to use African and African Diasporan terms as especially informed Afrogenic media for scientific discourse about these realities.
So researchers from Africa and North and South America have independently made complementary points about the African Diaspora based on Afrogenic, multiply conscious perspectives. We have looked at African Diasporan societies based on Afrogenic concepts elicited from or discernable in the cultures in question, which we have discussed using African and African Diasporan terms. We have drawn our understandings from viewing African Diasporan societies comparatively in the context of their conceptual continuity with their African roots, while also assuming African Diasporan agency and creativity. These findings suggest leads for seeking similarly resistant complexes of various kinds in other African Diasporan societies. Creole languages should, for example, be especially rich sources of such terminology and concepts given their origins and functions as literal and/or metaphoric maroon languages.
The Afrogenic double/multiple consciousness of most of the contributors allows us to perceive, through the realities of our own lives and those of our communities’ behaviors, conceptual principles to which we can apply the results of our academic training in the dualistic methodology of an insider/outsider epistemological and hermeneutical approach. This Afrogenic approach has allowed for the identification of new sources of knowledge and ways of knowing, as well as new styles of expressing and methods of interpreting this knowledge. It has allowed Afrogenic rereadings of Eurogenic data and interpretations through Afrogenic eyes, in and on Afrogenic terms, to arrive at very different conclusions. This reversal of perspectives has made visible, noticeable, and significant what had been invisibilized, gone unnoticed, and been deemed insignificant.
Of course, this reversal of perspectives from Eurogenic to Afrogenic represents the normal perspective through which Africans and African Diasporans actually live and see the world; with the Eurogenic perspective as an imposed, or borrowed, perspective by which the lived Afrogenic reality has been externally interpreted and often misinterpreted. So our asserting of an Afrogenic perspective is simply saying that we are telling our own stories from our own points of view. But rather than simply assuming the logical legitimacy of an Afrogenic perspective on the part of people of African origin, centered in our own lived realities and predicated on our own sense of agency, in the intellectually Eurocentric context of the Americas, it is necessary to defend the validity of such an obvious point of view.
This "reversal" is an indispensable source of a corrective balance for understanding the Americas. It permits everyone who is interested to look at the Afro-Euro-Americas from the neglected perspective of their Afrogenic, not just their hyperbolized Eurogenic, reality. The fundamental issue is the inherent richness of having a double/multiple consciousness with which to make possible a complex, nuanced, and multidimensional understanding of the African Diaspora and of Pan-America.
The Americas have been (mis)(re)presented as a Eurogenic creation. From the information presented in this volume, it is clear that the Americas represent a much more complex puzzle than the one that has been presented as complete, in spite of its lacking so many crucial pieces. For these missing pieces, either blank "origin unknown" pieces, or jive distorted pieces have been substituted. Only by adding the real Afrogenic pieces can the rich mosaic of the Americas be correctly portrayed.
In fact, the African Diaspora represents the intersection of at least three planes of multidimensional, intersecting, and interdependent puzzles. There is the transnational African puzzle of those cultures that have, over the past five centuries, managed to establish more or less evident overseas outposts in the Americas. This African substratum is now part of the foundational substance of the Americas, and appears in various forms in different places in myriad ways, many of which have yet to be decrypted. My experiences have led me into some small paths that hint at this larger vision. This is a surface that has hardly been scratched, of which there remain to be discovered both unplumbed depths and unsuspected manifestations.
Then there is the puzzle of the African Diaspora per se, of which some of the explanatory pieces for one society may be found in another, as I learned in trying to make intellectual sense of basic issues of language, naming, food, and the spirit, first in New Jersey, and then beyond. Only with a comparative vision was it possible to identify these pieces, discover their relevance, and assemble them to form a picture based on foundational principles many of which still remain to be discerned.
And finally, an accurate Pan-American puzzle must be predicated on the intersection of these transatlantic African and African Diasporan puzzles with the Native American and European Diasporan puzzles of the Americas. We will now begin an Afrogenic Pan-American journey of puzzling discovery of the (un)familiar Africanity of everyday life in the Americas.