AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 11

Reference
The African Diaspora is a reality and
a fact. Hundreds of years ago, millions of
people were forcibly removed from the African
continent and flung across oceans, forced to
labor and suffer the inhumanity of those who
purchased, traded and used them like objects
or animals. In the centuries since, the descendants
of the dispersed have formed new
cultures that have themselves grown to impact
and shape the world — including the continent
of their initial dispersion — not by conquest but
by the power of their content. These cultures
are connected by their place of origin, their
shared and similar histories, and their constant
influence and reliance on one another.
The African Diaspora is also a story and
a tool. And as such, how we choose to envision
it narratively will have the most crucial impact
on how we perceive its reality and how effective
a use we make of its utility. As with so many
things, the shape of Diaspora is determined
largely by how we choose to see it.
In the previous segment of this series, we
encountered several frameworks developed
by scholars of different fields and times. Some
have been specific to the African Diaspora,
while others have sought to define diasporas
as a whole. Some begin with the trans-Atlantic
slave trade and some point to a distant
moment in antiquity as the point where our
Diaspora began. And while some upheld the
idea of the “underlying African self” classifying
all members of the Diaspora as essentially the
same, others emphasized difference and the
spaces between us. Yet despite these differences,
each of them is a story of us, a lens, lending
a specific shape to how we see our Diaspora,
our communities and ourselves. And like any
tool, these stories must be evaluated: How well
do they work? Do they help or harm? And what
direction do they point us in as we follow them
forward? So, as not to be overwhelmed by the
sheer multitude of current diaspora models,
this series will confine itself to two which have
been most impactful for the African Diaspora
particularly, the Triadic model of Joseph
Harris’ and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.
The Triadic / Harris Model
Introduced by Jospeh Harris, one of
two scholars credited with first coining the
phrase “African Diaspora,” the Triadic model
is compact but robust. In concept it mirrors,
if not directly derives from, Eric Williams’
outline of the “Triangular Trade” in enslaved
Africans, raw materials and finished products
that ran between the three sites of Europe,
Africa and the many colonies of the “New
World.” Like Williams, Harris proposes an understanding
of the global complex of historical
and cultural interactions that make up the
Diaspora as a relationship between just three
significant points: The continent of Africa;
those who were dispersed (and their descendants);
and the lands to which they respectively
went. Between these few poles, however,
Harris encapsulates a myriad of relationships
and historical points. Outlined in his work,
The Dynamics of the Global African Diaspora,
part of the larger work, The African Diaspora,
edited by Alusine Jalloh and Stephen Maizlish,
Harris immediately notes the tangible
impact of diasporas as entities that, “develop
and reinforce images and ideas about [the
dispersed] and their original homelands, as
well as [affecting] the economies, politics, and
social dynamics of both the homeland and the
host country or area.”
In envisioning the history of our diaspora,
Harris divides the timeline between what he
terms the “historical diaspora,” made up of the
voluntary as well as involuntary movements
of Africans prior to the start of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade and the “modern diaspora,”
which is essentially everything that came after.
Though he makes the distinction specifically to
call out the extent to which African movement
in antiquity was volitional, he nevertheless
points to slave trades in both periods (specifically
the trans-Saharan trade which predates
the trans-Atlantic by more than a millennium)
as the primary forces that, “made the African
presence essentially global.”
Though the characteristics by which
Harris defines the African Diaspora have
already been explored in this series (see Issue
9), there remains more to be said. There are two
primary, binary dialectics at work in Harris’
triad. The first, a global dialogue between what
he terms “Africa,” and “its diaspora,” and the
second, between “homeland” and “hostland,”
played out in the communities and individual
minds of the dispersed. Not unexpectedly
the two exert strong influence upon one
another, as for Harris, it is the “gradual transformation
from African to African American
or African European [that] helps to explain the
complexity and dialectical contradictions in
the relations between the African diaspora and
the homeland, the phenomenon behind W.E.B.
DuBois’s concept of ‘double consciousness.’”
Whether this is a wholly accurate
depiction of DuBois’ double consciousness
or whether that concept constitutes a final
word in the process of African American identity-building,
Harris continues to explore
these dialectical contradictions comparing
the homeland/hostland dichotomy which he
situates at the root of every diaspora consciousness
to what he deems the more unified,
arguably less affected self-image of the
“African.” “When the colonial era ended,” he
argues, “after less than a century in most cases,
the colonial identity had not fully matured.
Consequently, until the 1960s, most Africans
in Africa retained a primary ethnic allegiance,
while their descendants abroad constituted a
‘stateless’ diaspora without a common country
of origin, language, religion or culture.”
The fact that, for Harris, the transition
from African to African American —
or any other iteration of Diaspora-identi-
96 aphrochic