AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 11

Reference
ty — complicates the question of identity for members of
the African Diaspora while failing to affect the arguably
tenuous designations of home and host lands (see Issue
9), suggests that this concept of Diaspora is one based on
the idea of the underlying African self. If there is, in fact, a
true African self that underlies every Diaspora culture and
every Diaspora member, then the characteristics of those
cultures are simply artificial overlays creating, gaps or, as
Edwards might suggest, “dècalage,” (see Issue 6) between
new, derivative cultures and the original. Further, Africa
would always remain, inescapably the homeland, no matter
how many generations it took to effect the transformation,
as he puts it, or how ingrained or successful the descendants
of the dispersed eventually became in their respective
hostlands.
The View From Here
The shape of Diaspora through the Triadic lens offers its
share of pros and cons. To begin with, stylistically, one has to
admire the efficiency of Harris’ design. He manages to accomplish
a lot with only three points of reference, encompassing
thousands of years of history, two distinct diasporic eras and
many competing identities, perspectives and conversations.
However there are also a few of what might best be termed,
“anachronisms,” engrained within the concept that may lead
us to question whether it is in fact the best depiction of the
Diaspora as we currently experience it.
The question of homeland/hostland dichotomies is one
with which we are already familiar, having argued previously
for the impossibility of keeping these as fixed notions — at
least to the extent demanded here — over several generations
of people born in diaspora. We have similarly explored the limitations
of the idea of an underlying African self, as pointed
out in the work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall (see Issues 5 & 6).
More pressing however, are the ways in which a Triadic model
fails to tell the whole story of the Diaspora by giving no space
to the many intricate relationships that exist between diaspora
cultures themselves.
The experience of the African Diaspora does not consist
solely of the relationship of dispersed Africans to Africa, and it
never has. Equally if not more impactful has always been the relationship
between the former sites of colonial enslavement. We
have seen the power of these relationships as they have shaped
our whole retelling of the history of Pan-Africanism. They
inspired Henry Sylvester Williams to hold the first conference,
filled Alain Locke’s New Negro, with the thoughts and creativity
of Caribbean authors alongside their African American counterparts,
and turned Harlem’s “Renaissance” into the Negritude
of the Francophone Diaspora. To mistake the uniqueness
of Diaspora cultures for simple deviations from a supposed
African original is to miss the beauty of what these cultures have
become and what they have and continue to mean and contribute
to one another. It’s also part of a larger question and potentially
indicative of an even larger problem. AC