指导英国assignment-英国assignment指导-vexing problems of recent hist

指导英国assignment-英国assignment指导，One of the more vexing problems of recent historical work on black culture and politics in an international sphere is that the term diaspora, soattractive to many of our analyses, does not appear in the literature underconsideration until surprisingly late after the Second World War. Ofcourse, black artists and intellectuals, from Edward Wilmot Blyden, Martin
Delany, and Pauline Hopkins in the nineteenth century to W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté in the early twentieth,
have long been engaged with themes of internationalism, but diaspora hasonly in the past forty years been a term of choice to express the links andcommonalities among groups of African descent throughout the world.Here I will engage this problem by taking up Khachig Tölölyan’s signal
call to “return to diaspora”: the confusing multiplicity of terms floatingthrough recent work, he argues—including “exile,” “expatriation,” “postcoloniality,”
“migrancy,” “globality,” and “transnationality,” among others—make it “necessary to ‘return to diaspora,’ which is in danger of becoming
a promiscuously capacious category that is taken to include all theadjacent phenomena to which it is linked but from which it actually differsin ways that are constitutive, that in fact make a viable definition of diasporapossible.”1 Both Tölölyan and James Clifford have recently writtenvaluable comparative overviews of uses of the term.2 I will limit my considerationhere to the politics of “diaspora” in black historical work andcultural criticism, however, as the term marks a quite specific interventionin that arena, one that may not be subsumable into some overarchingframe of inquiry.3 I will be particularly concerned with excavating thefunction performed by the term in the work of Paul Gilroy, as he is theone theorist cited in almost all recent considerations of these issues. Thereception of his brilliant 1993 study, The Black Atlantic, threatens continually(despite Gilroy’s own qualifications) to conflate diaspora, and itsparticular history of usage in black cultural politics, with Gilroy’s propositionof that field he calls the “black Atlantic”— a phrase rapidly beingcanonized and institutionalized in the U.S. academy.
I am not suggesting that one must limit the term’s object of study to
more contemporary phenomena. On the contrary, I want to excavate ahistoricized and politicized sense of diaspora for my own work, whichfocuses on black cultural politics in the interwar period, particularly in#p#分页标题#e#
Brent Hayes
Edwards
The Uses of Diaspora
Social Text 66, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press.transnational circuits of exchange between the so-called Harlem Renaissanceand pre-Negritude Francophone activity in France and West Africa.4
I am rethinking the uses of diaspora more precisely to compel a discussionof the politics of nominalization, in a moment of prolixity and careless
rhetoric when such a question is often the first casualty. An intellectualhistory of the term is needed, in other words, because diaspora is taken upat a particular conjuncture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular
kind of epistemological work.5
The use of diaspora emerges directly out of the growing scholarly interestin the Pan-African movement in particular, and in black internationalismin general, that began to develop in the 1950s. It is important to recallthat Pan-Africanism, referring both to Henry Sylvester Williams’s Pan-African Conference in 1900 and to the congresses organized by W. E. B.
Du Bois and others in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, 1945, and 1974, arises as
a discourse of internationalism aimed generally at the cultural and political
coordination of the interests of peoples of African descent around the world.
As Du Bois declared in 1933, in a celebrated piece published in the Crisis,
“Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and co-operation among all
groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible
time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples.”6
This emphasis on vanguardist collaboration toward a unified articulation
of the interests of “African peoples” at the level of international policy
is generally considered to have been influenced by a number of popular
currents; the most important of these currents included the diverse
ideologies of “return” that were so often a component of the African
experience in the New World. Indeed, Du Bois would go so far as to
claim that the motivations of Pan-Africanism are paradigmatically African
American. If black New World populations have their origin in the fragmentation,
racialized oppression, and systematic dispossession of the slave
trade, then the Pan-African impulse stems from the necessity to confront
or heal that legacy through racial organization itself: through ideologies of
a real or symbolic return to Africa. Even toward the end of his life, when
he became more directly involved—particularly in Ghana—in what has
been termed “continental Pan-Africanism,” Du Bois clung to this New
World orientation. In The World and Africa, for example, he writes:
The idea of one Africa to unite the thought and ideals of all native peoples of
the dark continent belongs to the twentieth century and stems naturally from#p#分页标题#e#
the West Indies and the United States. Here various groups of Africans,
quite separate in origin, became so united in experience and so exposed to
the impact of new cultures that they began to think of Africa as one idea and
one land.7
46 Brent Hayes Edwards
By the 1950s, scholars were beginning to consider this paradigmatically
New World impulse, which St. Clair Drake memorably encapsulated
with the phrase the “Africa interest,” as a broad force in African
American identity formation.8 At times the “Africa interest” was inflected
toward a return to the African continent itself, as in the nineteenth-century
colonization and missionary movements, for instance. But in a larger
sense, scholarship on the history of the “Africa interest” was a way of
coming to terms with the consistent necessity of an ideological “return” to
the question of Africa, as a figure for the question of origins—a return to
what Edouard Glissant calls the “point of entanglement [intrication].” The
problematic of “return” in this sense consistently animated black ideologies
as diverse as Garveyism, Negritude, and the numerous black New
World discourses of “Ethiopianism”; it also animated a great deal of the
groundbreaking African American history and sociology in the first
decades of the century (by Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Arturo
Schomburg, among others).9 In the interwar period, these roots were
extended in the emerging discipline of anthropology, especially through
the influential work of scholars such as Jean Price-Mars and Melville Herskovits
on “African survivals” in New World black cultures.10 These
issues of cultural retention were equally dominant in the historical and
archival work that followed the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress,
work by scholars including St. Clair Drake, George Shepperson, Rayford
Logan, Harold Isaacs, James Ivy, Dorothy Porter, Adelaide Cromwell Hill,
and E. U. Essien-Udom.11
I will return below to Francophone articulations of diaspora, but I
want to mention here the specific role of the journal Présence africaine,
often cited as a fertile ground for diasporic work. On the one hand, it
should be recalled that at its outset, Présence africaine was not primarily
conceived as a diasporic project, focusing on issues of connection and collaboration
among peoples of African descent. It was more expressly conceived
as an African incursion into modernity. In the mission statement of
the first issue, Alioune Diop writes,
Reaching beyond the confines of French colonization, [Présence
africaine] intends to raise and study the general problem of Europe’s relations
with the rest of the world, taking Africa as an example, especially since#p#分页标题#e#
her black mankind finds itself to be the most disinherited. . . .
The black man [Le noir], conspicuous by his absence in the building up
of the modern city, will be able to signify his presence little by little by contributing
to the recreating of a humanism reflecting the true measure of
man. . . .
As to us Africans, we are expecting concrete results from these cultural
activities. To enable us to merge with modern society and to identify our-
Uses of Diaspora 47
selves clearly in that society, PRESENCE AFRICAINE, while revealing us to the
world, will, more than anything else, persuade us to have faith in ideas.12
It should not be surprising that the journal was conceived in the European
metropolis by a group of “overseas students” (étudiants d’outre mer—
more precisely, students from the overseas French colonies, or France
d’outre mer), who felt following the ravages of the war that they constituted
“a new race, mentally mixed [mentalement métissée],” and who began to
reconsider their position in European discourses of “universal” humanism.
13 Présence africaine, as the title announces, inscribes an African presence
into modernity and inaugurates the “re-creation” of the humanist
project through that intervention.14 The aims of such a project are notably
different than those announced by interwar Francophone journals in
Paris, like La Dépêche africaine, which explicitly strove to foster “correspondence”
among blacks throughout the world, or La Revue du monde
noir, which intended “to create among Negroes [les Noirs] of the entire
world, regardless of nationality, an intellectual, and moral tie, which will
permit them to better know each other[,] to love one another, to defend
more effectively their collective interests and to glorify their race.”15 On
the other hand, even given the express aims of Présence africaine, one
should not forget that the translation of Diop’s “Niam N’Goura” quoted
above is by Thomas Diop and Richard Wright, the African American
writer then living in Paris. Even if Présence africaine did not initially aim to
theorize black internationalism, it represents black internationalism in
practice, particularly through its translations16 and through the international
congresses of black artists and intellectuals it hosted in Paris in
1956 and Rome in 1959. Moreover, especially in its “new series” after
1955, Présence africaine explicitly espoused an anticolonialist stance and
argued that “our common national aspirations” provided the foundation
for the “solidarity of colonized peoples.”17 In the context of independence
struggles in Africa, the journal would prove receptive to work on diaspora#p#分页标题#e#
as it emerged in the 1960s.18
Toward a Genealogy of the African Diaspora Concept
The turn to diaspora in the early 1960s marks in no small degree a break
from the “Africa interest” orientation, which, as Penny Von Eschen has
pointed out, was greatly molded by the exigencies of the Cold War. Even
when in collaboration with Francophone scholarship, much of the work
emanating from the United States during that period was conditioned by
an unrelenting American exceptionalism.19 Of course, the figurative ele-
48 Brent Hayes Edwards
ments of the turn were by no means new: syncretic African American
slave cultures had found resonance in the Old Testament tales of Exodus,
and references to the “scattering” of Africans into the New World were
common at least since the work of Blyden in the nineteenth century. But
the crystallization of these figurative allusions into a theoretical discourse
of diaspora, explicitly in dialogue with the long-standing Jewish traditions
behind the term, responds to a set of historiographic needs particular to
the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially in the work of historians George
Shepperson and Joseph Harris.
Although it is often overlooked, the necessity of this conceptual turn is
first developed in a work in the growing field of African history, and
specifically around the issue of African resistance to colonialism. The
1958 Independent African, by George Shepperson and Thomas Price, is a
celebrated study of the revolts that took place in British Central Africa in
1915, often considered to be the first in a long series of African resistance
movements in the modern period that led in discontinuous eruptions to
the independence struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.20 Shepperson and
Price, attempting to explain the development of John Chilembwe, the
African minister who led the uprising out of his mission in the Shire
Highlands in what was then called Nyasaland, spend a significant amount
of time considering his trip to the United States in 1897, where Chilembwe
became associated with the National Negro Baptist Convention (IA,
112), studied at the Virginia Theological Seminary, and entered the ministry.
The authors are at pains to come to terms with the influence of that
New World context, given the great flux of black cultural and intellectual
work that emerges at the turn of the century in the United States in particular:
the struggle against U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and the
Philippines, which in part was expressed in the Niagara movement of
1905 (IA, 103); the cultural histories of the “African background” that
would emerge in the work of Du Bois and Woodson; the histories of black
insurrection in the United States and the Caribbean (IA, 106–7); and the
prevalence of diverse nineteenth-century “return” ideologies and “Back to#p#分页标题#e#
Africa” projects such as the American Colonization Society. For Shepperson
and Price, the explanation of Chilembwe’s intellectual development
in this milieu requires an understanding of transnational black influences
that would have to diverge sharply from depoliticized, vanguardist
considerations of an “Africa interest.”
In an oft-cited essay published in Phylon in 1962,21 Shepperson
extended this work theoretically by reconsidering the uses and limitations
of the term Pan-African. Attempting to clear a field that had become
increasingly crippled by indiscriminate references to “Pan-Africanism”
in terms of any consideration of racial organization or black international-
Uses of Diaspora 49
ism, Shepperson broke the term down into its “proper” and “common”
senses: “Pan-Africanism” (capital P) indicates the history of the transnational
movement itself, the limited parameters of the Pan-African Congress
from 1900 on. But another derivation of the term was required:
“On the other hand, ‘pan-Africanism’ with a small letter is not a clearly
recognizable movement, with a single nucleus such as the nonagenarian
Du Bois. . . . It is rather a group of movements, many very ephemeral” (P,
346). For Shepperson, the “cultural element often predominates” in this
diverse grouping of pan-African movements, but these formations are not
at all limited to this focus (this is not a split between “political” and “cultural”
versions of Pan-Africanism, as it sometimes has been misread).
Shepperson considers the small “p” term to cover both aesthetic evocations
and political institutions, such as church organizations, academic
conferences and associations, lobbying groups, and various radical pressure
groups. Finally, the ideological diversity that falls under the broad
rubric including both Pan-Africanism and pan-Africanism, Shepperson
argues, demonstrates that Africa itself emerges as a concept only historically,
mainly through external evocations of “continental unity,” and calls
for return (P, 349).
I will highlight two components of this revision or splitting of Pan-
Africanism. On the one hand, Shepperson rereads the term precisely to
make room for ideological difference and disjuncture in considering black
cultural politics in an international sphere. He specifically invokes the
need to consider the ways black internationalisms have been refracted
through the Caribbean, for example, especially through the disproportionate
contributions of Caribbean migrants to U.S. ideologies of liberation
in the early parts of the century.22 In Shepperson’s view, it is crucial
to be able to account for the transformative “sea changes” that Pan-#p#分页标题#e#
African thought undergoes in a transnational circuit. One crucial instance
involves the work of Marcus Garvey, who was often described as a “pan-
Negroist” after the First World War even as Du Bois’s Pan-African Congress
initiatives were articulated directly in opposition to Garvey’s populist
and racialist version of “Back to Africa.” Later, though, Shepperson
points out, Garvey is factored into the pan-African tradition, especially
through the African intellectuals who dominated the movement after the
1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress, such as Kwame Nkrumah, who
expressly cited Garvey’s Philosophy and Opinions as one of the main influences
in the development of continental African race consciousness and
independence ideologies (P, 347–48). At the same time, Shepperson
claims that many of these discontinuities in “pan-Africanism” and “Pan-
Africanism” are rooted not just in ideological disjunctures but also in
the linguistic difference that necessarily has crucial consequences for any
50 Brent Hayes Edwards
consideration of black internationalism. He notes the role of the Liga
Africana, the federation of Portuguese African associations, in the 1923
Pan-African Congress in Lisbon (P, 355) but considers the most important
arena of linguistic difference to arise in French, particularly through
French participation in the first and second Pan-African Congresses and
through the influence of Negritude after World War II:
Above all, the story of French-speaking African participation in Pan-
Africanism and pan-Africanism has yet to be told. Blaise Diagne, Deputy
from Senegal, and Gratien Candace, deputy from Guadeloupe, played
important roles in the 1919 and 1921 Pan-African Conferences. But their
ultimate split with the Du Bois forces was to be seen in their references to
themselves as “we Frenchmen,” whereas the English-speaking delegation
called themselves “we Negroes.” By 1921, the difference between the two
groups was revealed when Du Bois felt that he had to stand out against the
flood of anti-Garvey statements from Diagne and Candace and took the
unusual step of saying in public that he agreed with the Jamaican’s main
principles. (P, 355–56)
The point is that Shepperson is attempting to push here toward a
revised or expanded notion of black international work that would be able
to account for such unavoidable dynamics of difference, rather than either
assuming a universally applicable definition of “Pan-African” or presupposing
an exceptionalist version of New World “Pan-African” activity.
He goes so far as to suggest “all-African” as a “collective term” (P, 346)
for this wider, more various context of black internationalism. Shepperson#p#分页标题#e#
closes the essay with a call to consider “All-Africanism in its international
context: If it is necessary to study Pan-Africanism and pan-Africanism in
a wider African context than the specifically West African, it is of equal
importance to look at it in its full international perspective, in time as well
[as] in space” (P, 358).
In October 1965, Shepperson formalized this intervention with a
paper called “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora,” originally
delivered on a panel arranged by Joseph Harris at the International Congress
of African Historians at University College, Dar es Salaam.23 It is
this paper that is usually credited with introducing the notion of “diaspora”
into the study of black cultural politics and history. Shepperson
starts by explicitly invoking the “Jewish Dispersal or Diaspora” with a
quote from chapter 28 of Deuteronomy (“Thou shall be removed into all
the kingdoms of the earth”), then he extends the analogy:
Although it cannot be said that the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, the socalled
Negroes, have been dispersed into all kingdoms and countries of the
Uses of Diaspora 51
world, they have certainly migrated to a very large number of them. And the
forces which have driven them abroad, slavery and imperialism, have been
similar to those which scattered the Jews. It is, therefore, not difficult to
understand why the expression “the African Diaspora” has gained currency
as a description of the great movement which, according to one estimate
made in 1946, has been responsible for creating over 41 million people of
African descent in the Western hemisphere. (D, 152)
The essay is a rather schematic elaboration of the uses of “diaspora”
in a re-visioning of African historiography; it moves by list-making, by
enumerating the objects of study that might fall under the rubric of “the
African abroad.” Again, Shepperson uses the term precisely to push
beyond the ways that “Pan-African” limits the scope of analysis: “diaspora”
studies would involve not only attention to the “idea and practice of
African unity” (i.e., Pan-Africanism and pan-Africanisms) (D, 168–69)
but also an understanding of slavery influenced in particular by the historical
work of W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James, which considers the
slave trade as central to any understanding of Western modernity or “universal
history” (D, 161); an investigation into the effects of slave trade and
subsequent imperialism on Africa itself, and patterns of dispersal internal
to the continent (D, 162, 170); an analysis of “African survivals” in the
black cultures of the New World (D, 162–66); and a consideration of the#p#分页标题#e#
influence of African Americans on the emergence of African nationalism
(D, 166).
In Shepperson’s usage, in other words, the term is quite flexible: he
suggests that the concept of diaspora “can be considerably extended, both
in time and space,” and part of the use of the concept is precisely in its
extensions (D, 152). The “African diaspora” here adheres to many of the
elements considered to be common to the three “classic” diasporas (the
Jewish, the Greek, and the Armenian): in particular, an origin in the scattering
and uprooting of communities, a history of “traumatic and forced
departure,” and also the sense of a real or imagined relationship to a
“homeland,” mediated through the dynamics of collective memory and
the politics of “return.”24 As a frame for knowledge production, the
“African diaspora” likewise inaugurates an ambitious and radically decentered
analysis of transnational circuits of culture and politics that are resistant
or exorbitant to the frames of nations and continents.
The turn to diaspora arises not in terms of black cultures in the
New World but in the context of revising what Shepperson calls “isolationist”
(D, 173) and restrictive trends in African historiography—thus
the apposition enunciated by the essay’s title (“The African Abroad or the
African Diaspora”). In addition, the “African diaspora” is formulated
expressly through an attempt to come to terms with diverse and cross-
52 Brent Hayes Edwards
fertilized black traditions of resistance and anticolonialism. On a theoretical
level, this intervention focuses especially on relations of difference
and disjuncture in the varied interactions of black internationalist discourses,
both in ideological terms and in terms of language difference
itself.25
This is not to suggest that Shepperson is definitively the first intellectual
to use the phrase the African diaspora. Shepperson has insisted that
the use of the expression was “certainly established” in scholarly vocabulary
before the 1965 Dar es Salaam conference.26 In his 1982 essay
“African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” he sketches the development
of the term:
At some time between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, the period in
which many African states were breaking away from European empires and
achieving independence, the expression African diaspora began increasingly
to be used by writers and thinkers who were concerned with the status and
prospects of persons of African descent around the world as well as at home.
Who first used this expression, I do not know; and I wish very much that
someone would attempt the difficult task of tracing the employment of the#p#分页标题#e#
Greek word for dispersal—which, until it began to have the adjective African
or black attached to it, was used largely for the scattering abroad of the
Jews.27
I am less concerned here with unearthing the “originator” or first
usage of what Shepperson calls “the African diaspora concept.” Etymologies
are seductive in part because of the ruse of origin—the implication
that one can discover the roots of language use and transformation. They
are most instructive, though, in the ways they provide a sedimentation of
the social construction of linguistic meaning over time: as something not
unlike Raymond Williams’s notion of the “keyword,” which Michael
McKeon has felicitously described as an “antithetical structure expressing
a historical contradiction.”28 Rather than originary usage, the question is
why it becomes necessary at a certain historical conjuncture to employ the
term diaspora in black intellectual work. Shepperson himself begins to
point toward an answer as he conjectures why the nineteenth-century
black intellectual Edward Wilmot Blyden never used the term:
Considering Blyden’s knowledge of Hebrew, his interest in Jewish history,
and his sympathy with Zionist aspirations, it is surprising that he did
not employ the expression “the African diaspora.”
If, however, Blyden had popularized the expression “African diaspora”
in the nineteenth century and it had gained support amongst early African
nationalist intellectuals, it could have acquired political overtones which
would have rendered it useless for scholars today who find it convenient to
Uses of Diaspora 53
employ in their studies of the too long neglected subject of the African
abroad. Without political overtones, it serves as a satisfactory although
sometimes fluctuating focus for the various aspects of the African outside of
Africa.29
The point is not that diaspora is apolitical but that it has none of the
指导英国assignment-英国assignment指导“overtones” that make a term like Pan-Africanism already contested terrain.
In this sense, the turn to diaspora as a term of analysis allows for an
account of black transnational formations that attends to their constitutive
differences, the political stakes of the organization of the “African
abroad.” The accepted risk is that the term’s analytic focus “fluctuates.”
Like Pan-African, it is open to ideological appropriation in a wide variety
of political projects, from anticolonial activism to what has long been
called “Black Zionism”—articulations of diaspora that collapse the term#p#分页标题#e#
into versions of nationalism or racial essentialism.
Unfortunately, some of the most celebrated work on diaspora in the
past thirty years has served to undo this complex history of emergence. It
is impossible to take on the “African diaspora concept” without a great
debt to the work of historian St. Clair Drake, who may be the single intellectual
with the most impressive long-term commitment to its elaboration.
Still, it is difficult to endorse Drake’s theoretical conclusions in “Diaspora
Studies and Pan-Africanism,” a 1982 essay that offers a historically rich
but theoretically misleading overview of the development of “diaspora
studies.”30 Without fully coming to terms with Shepperson’s argument
about the great diversity of Pan-Africanist and pan-Africanist movements,
Drake simply periodizes a split between what he terms “traditional Pan-
African activity” (which encapsulates both of Shepperson’s senses of the
term)31 and a subsequent “continental Pan-Africanism” that develops as a
discourse of political unity in Africa itself in independence struggles after
the Second World War.32 He then discards the precise sense of diaspora as
an intervention in Shepperson’s work, by cataloging “diaspora studies as
an aspect of traditional Pan-African activity.” This ends up needlessly
conflating the two terms:
A concept of the black world is necessary in defining Pan-African activity. It
would include all of those areas where the population is actually black in a
phenotypic sense, that is, Negroid, or where the people think of themselves
as black despite considerable miscegenation, or where they are so defined by
others. For almost a century a conscious and deliberate movement has been
developing within various parts of the black world to increase cultural contacts
between its diverse segments and to unite them in the pursuit of common
interests. I refer to this as traditional Pan-African activity. For diaspora
studies to be considered an aspect of this activity, an aspect operating in the cul-
54 Brent Hayes Edwards
tural sector of it, they must contribute toward maintaining and reinforcing black
consciousness and must be oriented toward the goal of fostering understanding,
solidarity, and cooperation throughout the black world. (Drake’s emphasis)33
Without even engaging Drake’s unfortunate reliance on a genetic
(“phenotypic”) understanding of black identity, it should be clear that this
argument for the “parameters of African Diaspora Studies” departs from
Shepperson’s intervention in significant ways. Here “diaspora” marks a
simple continuity with “Pan-Africanism”—indeed, a reduction to its “cultural#p#分页标题#e#
sector,” rather than precisely a means to theorize both culture and
politics at the transnational level. Whereas Shepperson uses “diaspora” to
break with a depoliticizing emphasis on “unity” and unidirectional return
in midcentury black internationalist scholarship, Drake here reintroduces
the Pan-African concern with vaguely defined “cultural contacts,” with
projects of “fostering understanding, solidarity, and cooperation throughout
the black world.” This results in an elision with severe consequences
for the politics of diaspora as a term of analysis: in particular, it abandons
the insight that diaspora becomes necessary partly because of the
increased contestation over the political scope of Pan-Africanism in the
independence moment.34
Joseph Harris and Locksley Edmondson have provided a more convincing
historiography of the term. They suggest that we periodize the
African diaspora to distinguish between an initial history of migration
and “involuntary diaspora” (both inside Africa and through the Arab and
European slave trades) and the subsequent transnational formation of a
“mobilized diaspora,” a phenomenon particular to the twentieth century.
Harris defines the latter term by noting that in the early 1900s,
the major cities of the Western powers . . . became loci for the gathering of
diverse ethnic and political groups of African origin, facilitating the development
of an international network linking Africa to its diaspora; this network
may be called a mobilized diaspora. . . .
. . . 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
strength of the connection between Africans and the African diaspora remained
essentially their common origins in Africa as a whole and a common social
condition (social, economic, and political marginalization) throughout the
world.
It was this combination that paved the way for the development of an
effective international network by the mobilized African diaspora, namely,
descendant Africans with a consciousness of the identity of their roots, occupational
and communications skills, social and economic status, and access
to decision-making bodies in their host country.35
Uses of Diaspora 55
My point in resuscitating the history of the term itself, however, is that a
discourse of diaspora becomes necessary in the same period that the
“mobilized diaspora” is taking shape—indeed, the turn to “diaspora” is
precisely part of what allows that mobilization to occur.
At the same time, one might add that Drake’s “Diaspora Studies and#p#分页标题#e#
Pan-Africanism” appears in a collection edited by Joseph Harris, Global
Dimensions of the African Diaspora, arising out of the 1979 conference of
the First African Diaspora Studies Institute at Howard University. Despite
the problems of Drake’s take on diaspora, the collection overall might be
considered the culmination of the interventionist use of diaspora: it includes
essays by a wide range of internationally based intellectuals, including
Harris, Elliott Skinner, George Shepperson, and Lawrence Levine, among
others, and is organized precisely to signal both a politicized sense of the
stakes of these definitional issues and room for divergence and disagreement,
even around the use of the term diaspora as a frame for the conference
in general. Moreover, Global Dimensions highlights again not just
ideological disjuncture but also linguistic divergence as a central issue
in any approach to the question: four chapters were originally written
in French (by Oruno D. Lara, Daniel Racine, Guerin C. Montilus, and
Ibrahima B. Kaké), and there is copious coverage of the divergence of
Francophone Pan-Africanism and Negritude cultural politics within the
wider frame of the “African diaspora concept.”
Cultural Studies and Diaspora
A more complete genealogy of the uses of diaspora in black critical work
after the Second World War would have to turn to the institutionalization
of black studies in the U.S. academy in the 1960s and 1970s.36 That intervention
into the Western academy is an epistemological challenge,37
explicitly staked out through a politics of diaspora that rejects Western
assumptions about a link between knowledge production and the nation.
Invocations of diaspora were central and strategic in almost all of the mission
statements of black studies and African American studies departments
founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s—though not necessarily
in a manner consonant with the earlier work of Harris and Shepperson.
For instance, Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies, like much
of the programmatic literature, offers a split conception of diaspora that
separates an African past from a U.S. present: it is based on a “diasporan
focus treating first African Americans and then all other Africans spread
across the world.”38 Karenga explains this privileged division in pragmatic
terms:
56 Brent Hayes Edwards
Just as a point of departure and sound procedure, does not logic demand
a thrust which is not over-ambitious, but begins where it is, in the U.S.,
among African Americans, and then as it grows stronger, expands outward?
In other words, is not the study of African Americans the core of Black Studies
in the U.S., the study of an African people neglected more than any other,
certainly more than the study of Continentals or Caribbeans?39#p#分页标题#e#
This begs the question: what are the implications of such a “core” for
a black studies project? Wouldn’t such a “thrust” tend to cement an
American exceptionalism already prevalent in the U.S. academy, rather
than using diaspora precisely to break up that orientation? Or as C. L. R.
James put it in a 1970 interview:
The black students believe that black studies concerns them and black people
alone. But that is a mistake. Black studies mean the intervention of a
neglected area of studies that are essential to the understanding of ancient
and modern society. . . . Black studies require a complete reorganization of
the intellectual life and historical outlook of the United States, and world civilization
as a whole.40
The discourse of diaspora, in other words, is both enabling to black
studies, in the service of such an “intervention,” and inherently a risk, in
that it can fall back into either racial essentialism or American vanguardism.
More recently, this complex history of institutional intervention has
been elided by the “internationalization” of the discourse of diaspora
developed in British cultural studies. Scholars including Mae Henderson,
Wahneema Lubiano, and Sylvia Wynter have expressed fears that the
recent “importing” of cultural studies into the U.S. academy often serves
to marginalize or even erase the hard-won gains of black studies and
African American studies programs.41 The stakes are not solely institutional
but also epistemological, since cultural studies methodology is often
portrayed in the United States as offering a “new” focus on issues of
diaspora. Certainly, what is often called the “turn to race” in the trajectory
of work associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
the University of Birmingham demands to be read equally as a turn to
diaspora. The scholarship that began to critique the presupposition of an
“English” national frame (particularly in Raymond Williams’s development
of a cultural studies paradigm) moves to a diasporic register as a
remedy to the constitutive links between racism and nationalism.42 This
strategic move arises, however, as a discourse discontinuous with the invocations
of diaspora in African American and African historiographic and
cultural work.43 The question of the possible conjuncture between these
Uses of Diaspora 57
different turns to diaspora, then, is central to the issue of the uses of diaspora
for contemporary critical scholarship with a transnational focus.
As in Shepperson’s work, a transnational imperative emerges in cultural
studies before it is crystallized with an explicit discourse of the
“African diaspora” in the mid-1980s. For example, the superb 1978 study#p#分页标题#e#
Policing the Crisis, written collaboratively by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher,
Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, points toward a nascent
diasporic register.44 The book is usually celebrated for its prescient claims
about the emergence of “authoritarian populism” in Britain politics—
which predict the ascent of 1980s Thatcherism in many of its most vicious
details—and for its theoretical insight that race should be understood as
the “modality in which class is lived” (PC, 394). But in the last chapter,
“The Politics of ‘Mugging,’ ” the authors turn from their patient and
polemical investigation of the social significance of the conjuncture of
“moral panic” around race, crime, and youth at a moment of particular
ideological crisis in British society at the end of the 1970s and offer a
groundbreaking analysis of the overall situation of black “settler” communities
in England in the postwar period. In a context of underemployment
and racialization, certain cultural features of the “settler colony,”
particularly the range of activities that fall under the popular term hustling,
are reconceived as “modes of survival” and even as the potential ground
of black consciousness and community resistance, rather than the taint
of black pathology and behavioral backwardness (PC, 352–53). “The
dynamic factor,” the authors write,
is the change in the way this objective process is collectively understood and
resisted. Thus, the social content and political meaning of “worklessness” is
being thoroughly transformed from inside. Those who cannot work are discovering
that they do not want to work under those conditions. . . . this
black sector of the class “in itself” has begun to undergo that process of
becoming a political force “for itself.” . . . This qualitative shift has not happened
spontaneously. It has a history. It began with the discovery of black
identity, more specifically the rediscovery, inside the experience of emigration,
of the African roots of “colony” life. (PC, 381)
Policing the Crisis describes this turn to “African roots” as inherently
transnational. The emergence of British black consciousness is never a
purely national phenomenon: it is influenced in particular by postwar
African independence movements and by the black rebellions of the 1960s
in the United States. Indeed, like Shepperson, Policing the Crisis expressly
raises the question of how black internationalist and liberationist ideologies
are translated from one “national” context to another. They specifically
invoke the “adoption and adaptation of Fanonism within the black move-
58 Brent Hayes Edwards#p#分页标题#e#
ment in the United States” (especially through the Black Power movement
and the Black Panthers), and they note that this “movement” of black ideological
work had a formative “impact on the developing consciousness of
black people everywhere, including those in Britain . . . because it suggested
that a political analysis, initiated in terms of colonial society and
struggle, was adaptable or transferable to the conditions of black minorities
in developed urban capitalist conditions” (PC, 386).
Stuart Hall has extended this work, most notably in his well-known
1980 essay “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,”
45 which, like the last chapter of Policing the Crisis, attempts to theorize
the function of difference in a global capitalist mode of production.
Here Hall returns more directly to Marx, to excavate a notion of articulation
that is crucial to any consideration of the politics of “diaspora.” To
understand capitalist production on a “global scale,” Hall writes (drawing
on the work of Althusser and Laclau), Marx began to theorize
an articulation [Gliederung] between two modes of production, the one “capitalist”
in the true sense, the other only “formally” so: the two combined
through an articulating principle, mechanism, or set of relations, because, as
Marx observed, “its beneficiaries participate in a world market in which the
dominant productive sectors are already capitalist.” That is, the object of
inquiry must be treated as a complex articulated structure which is, itself,
“structured in dominance.”46
Articulation here functions as a concept-metaphor that allows us to think
relations of “difference within unity,” non-naturalizable relations of linkage
between disparate societal elements. The functional “unity” of specific
and strategically conjoined structures, then, is emphatically
not that of an identity, where one structure perfectly recapitulates or reproduces
or even “expresses” another; or where each is reducible to the other. . . .
The unity formed by this combination or articulation is always, necessarily,
a “complex structure,” a structure in which things are related, as
much through their differences as through their similarities. This requires
that the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown—
since no “necessary correspondence” or expressive homology can be
assumed as given. It also means—since the combination is a structure (an
articulated combination) and not a random association—that there will be
structured relations between its parts, i.e., relations of dominance and subordination.
47
The notion of articulation is crucial not just because it combines the#p#分页标题#e#
structural and the discursive but also because it has a flip side: such “societies
structured in dominance” are also the ground of cultural resistance.
Uses of Diaspora 59
Hall, following Gramsci, contends that ideology must be considered the
key site of struggle over competing articulations.48 In a transnational circuit,
then, articulation offers the means to account for the diversity of
black “takes” on diaspora, which Hall himself explicitly begins to theorize
in the late 1980s as a frame of cultural identity determined not through
“return” but through difference: “not by essence or purity, but by the
recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of
‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference.”49
The turn to an explicit discourse of diaspora in cultural studies comes
in 1987 in Paul Gilroy’s “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack,” although
Gilroy’s fifth chapter, “Diaspora, Utopia and the Critique of Capitalism,”
departs in significant ways from Hall’s more strictly Marxist vocabulary of
articulation. It is crucial to recognize that diaspora functions in this work,
written at the height of Thatcherite domination in Britain, in a very different
way than in Shepperson’s African historiography. Whereas for
Shepperson diaspora is a way of coming to terms with transnational circuits
of intellectual influence in the development of black internationalism
and resistance to colonialism, in Gilroy’s work it is invoked to account for
the peculiar position of black communities in Britain during a period
when nationalism was being perniciously expressed through recourse to
populist racism. Gilroy writes:
Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Its unique cultures
draw inspiration from those developed by black populations elsewhere. In
particular, the culture and politics of black America and the Caribbean have
become raw materials for creative processes which redefine what it means to
be black, adapting it to distinctively British experience and meanings. Black
culture is actively made and re-made.50
Reading this quote, one wonders what is lost in positioning black U.S.
and Caribbean cultures as “raw materials” for “black British” expressive
culture—such a trajectory would seem to efface the equally syncretic
“made-ness” (and the equally transnational sources) of black culture
in those supposedly “raw” New World contexts. (Moreover, is “adaptation,”
in Gilroy’s terminology, the same process as active “making and
re-making”?) But Gilroy’s inattention to the “raw material” metaphor is
not surprising when we consider the degree to which his project is shaped#p#分页标题#e#
by the needs of theorizing black British culture as exorbitant to the nationstate.
Diaspora is only one of the terms Gilroy uses in attempting to define
what he sees as a “new structure of cultural exchange” that in the twentieth
century has been “built up across the imperial networks which once
played host to the triangular trade of sugar, slaves and capital” (157). He
also writes of black culture as “exported” (157, 184), “transferred” (157),
60 Brent Hayes Edwards
“translated” (194), as “syncretic” (155), as “articulated” in something
approaching Hall’s sense (160, 187), even rhapsodizing on the “living
bridge” between performance and improvisation in black British popular
music and “African traditions of music-making which dissolve the distinctions
between art and life” (164). Such slippage among terms, I would
suggest, is mainly due to Gilroy’s salutary efforts to identify that “new
structure of cultural exchange,” especially in terms of popular musical
forms like hip hop, dub, and soul—forms which at that time were just
beginning to be investigated in more detail by cultural critics including
Gilroy and Dick Hebdige. Still, the chapter is ultimately less interested in
theorizing diaspora itself than in evading the limiting confines of the
British nation. Gilroy turns to “the framework of a diaspora” not in order
to specify that space but “as an alternative to the different varieties of
absolutism which would confine culture in ‘racial,’ ethnic or national
essences” (155). He contends that “national units are not the most appropriate
basis for studying this history for the African diaspora’s consciousness
of itself has been defined in and against constricting national boundaries”
(158). The result of this insistence on the evasion of the national
(even while, in the quote above, “diaspora” is confusingly defined at
least partially in national boundaries) is that Gilroy’s use of the term fluctuates,
to use Shepperson’s word. One is left uncertain about what “the
African diaspora’s consciousness of itself” might refer to—where that selfawareness
might be located. “Diaspora” here ultimately functions more as one
of the figures for Gilroy’s obstinate anti-absolutism and anti-essentialism
than as an elaboration of that “new structure of cultural exchange.”
This discourse of diaspora undergoes a shift in Gilroy’s 1993 the
Black Atlantic, the work that is often made to stand in for this entire complex
and discontinuous tradition of intervention—or, indeed, that is
sometimes viewed as itself the “origin” of such a transnational focus in#p#分页标题#e#
black cultural criticism. The issue, of course, is the stakes of the “black
Atlantic” as a term that (particularly in the adoption of Gilroy’s work in
the U.S. academy) often usurps the space that might otherwise be
reserved for diaspora. The success of the Black Atlantic has cleared space
for a wide range of intellectual work in the academy; still, this development
makes it all the more crucial to ask about the risks of black Atlantic
as a term of analysis that is not necessarily consonant with the sense of
diaspora as intervention that I have described above.51
It is sometimes overlooked that Gilroy himself is careful to propose
black Atlantic as a provisional or heuristic term of analysis, more in order
to open up a certain theoretical space that would radically dislodge any
inquiry grounded in singular frames—whether “race,” “ethnicity,” or
“nation”—than in order to formalize that space. For instance, in a telling
Uses of Diaspora 61
passage at the beginning of the book, he writes of “the stereophonic,
bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive
property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing,
communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called
the black Atlantic world.”52 (I read the characteristic tumble and stammer
of Gilroy’s adjectives describing the “black Atlantic” as the performance
of the category’s heuristic nature.) At the same time, Gilroy often pushes
toward something like a typology of cultural politics in the “black
Atlantic,” especially in terms of the local and global circuits of production
and reception of black music. To this end, he enjoins cultural historians to
think of “the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussion
of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational
and intercultural perspective”(Black Atlantic, 15). Or as he writes
soon thereafter,
the history of the black Atlantic since [Columbus], continually crisscrossed
by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in
various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship—provides
a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity,
and historical memory. They all emerge from it with special clarity if we
contrast the national, nationalistic, and ethnically absolute paradigms of
cultural criticism to be found in England and America with those hidden
expressions, both residual and emergent, that attempt to be global or
outer-national in nature. These traditions have supported countercultures of
modernity that touched the workers’ movement but are not reducible to it.
(16)#p#分页标题#e#
Gilroy simultaneously signals the importance of the term diaspora
itself as an equally “heuristic means to focus on the relationship of identity
and non-identity in black political culture” (81), and the final chapter of
The Black Atlantic is a sensitive consideration of the resonances of diaspora
both in Jewish and in black New World thought, elaborated through readings
of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the work of nineteenth-century intellectual
Edward Blyden. This continuing discourse of diaspora begs the
question of the introduction of the notion of the “black Atlantic,” which
would seem to impose an assumption of geographical specificity (what we
might term a hemispheric limit) and a “racial” context on a field that might
be much more broad and more various.
Gilroy adapts the conceptual unit of the Atlantic most notably from
the remarkable recent work of Peter Linebaugh (12-13). But Linebaugh’s
scholarship, and his recent collaborations with Marcus Rediker, are
explicitly focused on the rise of a working class in complex cultural histories
of sailors and vagabonds in ports around the Atlantic basin, who
62 Brent Hayes Edwards
from the beginnings of the slave trade onward so often resisted being
pressed into serving the expansion of capitalist modes of production on a
transnational scale.53 This antinomian “proletarian internationalism” is
linked to the development of black consciousness and the antislavery
movement, for Linebaugh, but at the same time, he does not suggest that
we can extract a singular or autonomous “black” transnational circuit of
cultural and political exchanges.54 Gilroy in any case is more concerned
with individual stories of travel (Du Bois’s sojourns in Germany, Richard
Wright living in France, the Fisk Jubilee Singers touring Europe in the late
nineteenth century) and abstract notions of transnational circuits of culture
than with specific ground-level histories of culture in port cities and
on ships around the world. The risk here is that black Atlantic loses the
broad range of the term diaspora, without even replacing it with a contextualized
history of transnational cultures in the Western hemisphere.
Although these questions are not worked through in the Black Atlantic
itself, Gilroy explained this strategy in a 1994 interview:
First we have to fight over the concept diaspora and to move it away from
the obsession with origins, purity and invariant sameness. Very often the
concept of diaspora has been used to say, “Hooray! we can rewind the tape
of history, we can get back to the original moment of our dispersal!” I’m saying
something quite different. That’s why I didn’t call the book diaspora
anything. I called it Black Atlantic because I wanted to say, “If this is a diaspora,#p#分页标题#e#
then it’s a very particular kind of diaspora. It’s a diaspora that can’t be
reversed.”55
I share Gilroy’s concern but find that ironically the terminology in the
Black Atlantic operates in a nearly inverse fashion: in the work itself, it is
the fascination with the Atlantic frame, and its focus on the triangular
slave trade in particular, that continually draws Gilroy back into the quagmire
of origins, by imposing (as he himself admits) “a tension that gets set
up around modernity as a chronological and temporal category—when
did modernity begin?”56 At the same time, we have started to see a reductive
kind of “serial logic” at work in studies of black transnational circuits
of culture, in which the “black Atlantic” would have to be set beside a
parallel oceanic frame of the “black Mediterranean” or the “black Pacific.”
I remain unconvinced that such oceanic frames can be thought of as separate
in any consistent manner, and I would argue that it is precisely the
term diaspora, in the interventionist sense I have sketched here, that would
allow us to think beyond such limiting geographic frames, and without
reliance on an obsession with origins.57
Another way to make this point is to note that a discourse of diaspora
functions simultaneously as abstraction and as anti-abstraction. We have
Uses of Diaspora 63
generally come to make recourse unquestioningly to its level of abstraction,
grounding identity claims and transnational initiatives in a history of
“scattering of Africans” that putatively offers a principle of unity—in
Gilroy’s phrase, “purity and invariant sameness”—to those dispersed
populations. I am arguing here neither to disclaim this history of dispersal
nor to substitute another abstraction (an alternate principle of continuity,
like the oceanic frame offered by Atlantic) but instead to emphasize the
anti-abstractionist uses of diaspora. As I have pointed out, a return to the
intellectual history of the term itself is necessary because it reminds us
that diaspora is introduced in large part to account for difference among
African-derived populations, in a way that a term like Pan-Africanism
could not. Moreover, diaspora points to difference not only internally (the
ways transnational black groupings are fractured by nation, class, gender,
sexuality, and language) but also externally: in appropriating a term so
closely associated with Jewish thought, we are forced to think not in terms
of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in
terms of a complex past of forced migrations and racialization—what
Earl Lewis has called a history of “overlapping diasporas.”58 (For a specific#p#分页标题#e#
example, in a history of black internationalism in France between the
world wars, diaspora points not just to the encounter in Marseille between
the Senegalese radical Lamine Senghor and the Jamaican novelist Claude
McKay, but also to the collaboration in the French Communist Party
between Senghor and the Vietnamese radical Nguyen Ai Quoc, later better
known as Ho Chi Minh.) The use of the term diaspora, I am suggesting,
is not that it offers the comfort of abstraction, an easy recourse to origins,
but that it forces us to consider discourses of cultural and political
linkage only through and across difference.
Reading Décalage
I return in closing to Stuart Hall’s notion of diaspora as articulated, as a
structured combination of elements “related as much through their differences
as through their similarities.” If a discourse of diaspora articulates
difference, then one must consider the status of that difference—not just
linguistic difference but, more broadly, the trace or the residue, perhaps,
of what resists translation or what sometimes cannot help refusing translation
across the boundaries of language, class, gender, sexuality, religion,
the nation-state. Whenever the African diaspora is articulated (just as
when black transnational projects are deferred, aborted, or declined) these
social forces leave subtle but indelible effects. Such an unevenness or differentiation
marks a constitutive décalage in the very weave of the culture,
64 Brent Hayes Edwards
one that can be neither dismissed nor pulled out. Léopold Senghor, in an
important short essay called “Négro-Américains et Négro-Africains,”
writes suggestively about the differences and influences between U.S.
blacks and African blacks as spun out across such a gap:
Le différend entre Négro-Américains et Négro-Africains est plus léger malgré
les apparences. Il s’agit, en réalité, d’un simple décalage—dans le temps
et dans l’espace. [Despite appearances, the difference between Negro-Americans
and Negro-Africans is more slight. In reality it involves a simple décalage—in
time and in space.]59
Décalage is one of the many French words that resists translation into
English; to signal that resistance and, moreover, to endorse the way that
this term marks a resistance to crossing over, I will keep the term in
French here.60 It can be translated as “gap,” “discrepancy,” “time lag,” or
“interval”; it is also the term that French speakers sometimes use to translate
“jet lag.” In other words, a décalage is either a difference or gap in time
(advancing or delaying a schedule) or in space (shifting or displacing#p#分页标题#e#
an object). I would suggest, reading somewhat against the grain of Senghor’s
text, that there is a possibility here in the phrase “in time and
space” of a “light” (léger) and subtly innovative model to read the structure
of such unevenness in the African diaspora.
The verb caler means “to prop up or wedge something” (as when one
leg on a table is uneven). So décalage in its etymological sense refers to the
removal of such an added prop or wedge. Décalage indicates the reestablishment
of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of
something that was added in the first place, something artificial, a stone or
piece of wood that served to fill some gap or to rectify some imbalance.
This black diasporic décalage among African Americans and Africans,
then, is not simply geographical distance, nor is it simply difference in
evolution or consciousness; instead, it is a different kind of interface that
might not be susceptible to expression in the oppositional terminology of
the “vanguard” and the “backward.” In other words, décalage is the kernel
of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received
biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water. It is a changing
core of difference; it is the work of “differences within unity,”61 an
unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and pressed.
Is it possible to rethink the workings of “race” in black cultural politics
through a model of décalage? Any articulation of diaspora in such a
model would be inherently décalé or disjointed by a host of factors. Like a
table with legs of different lengths, or a tilted bookcase, diaspora can be
discursively propped up (calé) into an artificially “even” or “balanced”
state of “racial” belonging. But such props, of rhetoric, strategy, or orga-
Uses of Diaspora 65
nization, are always articulations of unity or globalism, ones that can be
“mobilized” for a variety of purposes but can never be definitive: they are
always prosthetic. In this sense, décalage is proper to the structure of a
diasporic “racial” formation, and its return in the form of disarticulation
—the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation—must
be considered a necessary haunting. This reads against the grain of
Senghor, if one can consider his Negritude one influential variety of this
diasporic propping up. Instead of reading for the efficacy of the prosthesis,
this orientation would look for the effects of such an operation, for the
traces of such haunting, reading them as constitutive to the structure of
any articulation of diaspora.62#p#分页标题#e#
Recall that Hall points out the word articulation has two meanings:
“both ‘joining up’ (as in the limbs of the body, or an anatomical structure)
and ‘giving expression to.’”63 He suggests that the term is most useful in
the study of the workings of race in social formations when it is pushed
away from the latter implication, of an “expressive link” (which would
imply a predetermined hierarchy, a situation where one factor makes
another “speak”), and toward its etymology as a metaphor of the body.
Then the relationship between factors is not predetermined; it offers a
more ambivalent, more elusive model. What does it mean to say, for
example, that one articulates a joint? The connection speaks. Such “speaking”
is functional, of course: the arm bends at the elbow to reach down to
the table, the leg swivels at the hip to take the next step. But the joint is a
curious place, as it is both the point of separation (the forearm from the
upper arm, for example) and the point of linkage. Rather than a model of
ultimate debilitation or of predetermined retardation, then, décalage, in
providing a model for what escapes or resists translation through the
African diaspora, alludes to this strange two-ness of the joint. It directs
our attention to what I described earlier as the “antithetical structure” of
the term diaspora, its risky intervention. My contention, finally, is that articulations
of diaspora demand to be approached this way, through their
décalage. For paradoxically, it is exactly such a haunting gap or discrepancy
that allows the African diaspora to “step” and “move” in various
articulations. Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture,
because finally, in the body, it is only difference—the separation between
bones or members—that allows movement.
66 Brent Hayes Edwards
Notes
I would like to thank the graduate students in my seminar “Black Cultural Studies:
Issues and Approaches” at Rutgers University in the fall of 1998, where
much of the framework of this piece was conceived. Shorter versions of this essay
were presented at the City University of New York Americanist Group colloquium
and at the American Studies Association conference in Seattle in October
1998, and I am grateful to my co-panelists from both occasions: Alys Weinbaum,
David Kazanjian, Miranda Joseph, Melissa Wright, and Michael Denning. In
addition, Phillip Brian Harper, Daphne Lamothe, Randy Martin, Chandan
Reddy, and Bruce Robbins gave invaluable suggestions for revision.
1. Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the
Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5 (spring 1996): 8.
2. James Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late#p#分页标题#e#
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 244–78.
3. Tölölyan comments that African Americans make up a community that
“remains exceptional, not least in its formation as a diaspora, and it is both an
intellectual and political disservice to cloud that exceptionality by the piety of a
solidarity that conjoins all peoples of color in some ethnodiasporan or multiculturalist
discourse” (“Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 23). Although I follow Tölölyan
here in arguing that the intellectual history of an “African diaspora” discourse is
singular, it should be noted that my approach breaks with the emphasis on what
might be termed “comparative diasporas” exemplified by the editorial policy of
Diaspora, the journal he edits, as well as with other recent work (some of it quite
useful) that reads the African diaspora as only one example in a typology. Other
examples are Diaspora and Immigration, a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly
(98 [winter/spring 1999]) edited by V. Y. Mudimbe and Sabine Engel; Kim
Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora (forthcoming);
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1997); William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of
Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 (spring 1991): 83–99.
4. Brent Hayes Edwards, “Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance,”
in The Harlem Renaissance: Temples for Tomorrow, ed. Geneviève Fabre
and Michel Feith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2001),
359–96; and Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, forthcoming 2001).
5. In taking up a politics of the usage of diaspora, I am foregrounding the
analytical function of the term, because (although some recent historical work
confuses the issue) diaspora has not been a dominant term of political organization.
When black activists have assembled transnational movements, they have
turned to a wide range of terms (including Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism,
antifascism, communism, civil rights, Black Power, Afrocentrism, antiracism,
anti-apartheid), but seldom and only very recently to diaspora as rallying cry or
group appellation.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa and the New Racial Philosophy,” Crisis 40
(November 1933): 247.
7. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has
Played in World History (1946; expanded ed., New York: International Publishers,
Uses of Diaspora 67
1965), 7. For another version of this argument, see J. A. Langley, “New-World
Origins of Pan-Negro Sentiment,” in Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West
Africa, 1900–1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes (Oxford: Oxford University#p#分页标题#e#
Press, 1973), 17–40.
8. St. Clair Drake, “Negro Americans and the Africa Interest,” in The American
Negro Reference Book, ed. John P. Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice
Hall, 1966), 662–705.
9. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville,
Va.: CARAF Books/University Press of Virginia, 1989), 26. The original
is Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 36. Arguments of this period that
a problematic of “return” shapes both Negritude and Ethiopianism include St.
Clair Drake, “Hide My Face?—On Pan-Africanism and Negritude,” in Soon,
One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962, ed. Herbert Hill
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 77–105; and George Shepperson, “Ethiopianism
and African Nationalism,” Phylon 14 (first quarter 1953): 9–18. Drake
comments more generally on “‘The Return’ As a Pan-African Theme” in his
“Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora,
ed. Joseph Harris (Washington: Howard University Press, 1982), 359–66.
10. An excellent introduction is David Scott, “That Event, This Memory:
Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World,” Diaspora 1
(winter 1991): 261– 84.
11. Here is a small sampling of the wealth of “Africa interest” work in this
period, which focused in particular on black New World projects of return and
on African American ideological influences on Africa: Harold R. Isaacs, “The
American Negro and Africa: Some Notes,” Phylon 20 (fall 1959): 219 – 33;
George Shepperson, “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of
African Nationalism,” Journal of African History 1, no. 2 (1960): 299–312; E. U.
Essien-Udom, “The Relationship of Afro-Americans to African Nationalism,”
Freedomways 2 (fall 1962): 391– 407; Richard B. Moore, “Africa Conscious
Harlem,” Freedomways 3 (summer 1963): 315–34; Adelaide Cromwell and Martin
Kilson, Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American Leaders on Africa from
the 1800s to the 1950s (London: Frank Cass, 1969); Essien-Udom, “Black Identity
in the International Context,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience,
vol. 2: Since 1865, ed. Nathan Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel Fox (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 233 – 58; Shepperson, “The Afro-
American Contribution to African Studies,” Journal of American Studies 8
(December 1974): 281–301. See also Sterling Stuckey, “Black Americans and
African Consciousness: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Spell of Africa,” in Going
through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York:#p#分页标题#e#
Oxford University Press, 1994), 120–37.
12. Alioune Diop, “Niam N’Goura, or Présence africaine’s raison d’être,”
trans. Richard Wright and Thomas Diop, Présence africaine 1 (October–November
1947): 190–91. The French original appears in the same issue, 7–14.
13. Ibid., 186.
14. Bernard Mouralis, “Présence Africaine: The Geography of an ‘Ideology,’”
in The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness,
1947–1987, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6.
See also the account by Jacques Howlett, the French philosopher who worked
closely with Diop on the journal: “Présence Africaine, 1947–1958,” trans. Mercer
Cook, Journal of Negro History 43 (April 1958): 140–50.
68 Brent Hayes Edwards
15. La Dépêche africaine, under the direction of the Guadeloupean Maurice
Satineau, began publication in February 1928. The paper’s masthead presented it
as a “grand organe républicain indépendant de correspondence entre les Noirs et
d’Etudes des Questions Politiques et Economiques Coloniales.” The quote comes
from an editorial by Paulette Nardal and Léo Sajous, “Our Aim” [Ce que nous
voulons faire], trans. Nardal and Clara W. Shepard, La Revue du monde noir /
Review of the Black World 1 (1931).
16. The first issue included Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” translated
by Boris Vian, and Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee.”
Wright, working with the journal’s editorial board until 1950, was also responsible
for Présence africaine’s publishing Frank Marshall Davis, Samuel Allen,
Horace Cayton, and C. L. R. James. Like La Revue du monde noir in the early
1930s, Présence africaine also published an English edition.
17. “Foreword,” Présence africaine, new series, nos. 1–2 (April–July 1955): 8.
18. In a sense, the international congresses mark a convergence between the
intellectual formations around the “Africa interest” in the United States and the
“African presence” in France, culminating in publications such as Africa Seen by
American Negro Scholars, the volume published in 1958 in a joint venture of
Diop’s Société africaine de culture and its U.S. cousin, the American Society
of African Culture, headed by John A. Davis. See also the American Society of
African Culture, Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1962).
19. Von Eschen argues more particularly that the “Africa interest” was not
always articulated with the exigencies of decolonization and independence. There#p#分页标题#e#
were loud silences around the wealth of radical work that was specifically seeking
such an internationalization in the period (most prominently, the work of George
Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and the Council
on African Affairs). Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans
and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997),
176.
20. George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John
Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising
of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958) (hereafter cited as IA).
For commentary on Independent African, see particularly Cedric Robinson,
“Notes on a ‘Native’ Theory of History,” Review 4 (summer 1980): 45–78.
21. George Shepperson, “Pan-Africanism and ‘pan-Africanism’: Some Historical
Notes,” Phylon 23 (winter 1962): 346–58 (hereafter cited as P).
22. Ibid., 356. We now have a definitive history of these dynamics, Winston
James’s impressive Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in
Early-Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998).
23. Shepperson, “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora,” in Emerging
Themes of African History, ed. T. O. Ranger (Nairobi: East African Publishing
House, 1968), 152–76 (hereafter cited as D). It is crucial to note that this essay
was first published in Africa Forum, the journal of the American Society of
African Culture (see note 11 above); in that arena, it marks an explicit intervention
into the assumptions of the “Africa interest.” The citation (note the inversion
of the title: the essay is identical, but this title emphasizes the “diaspora”
concept rather than African history) is Shepperson, “The African Diaspora—or
the African Abroad,” Africa Forum: A Quarterly Journal of African Affairs 1, no. 2
(summer 1966): 76–93. For Joseph Harris’s comments on the Dar es Salaam
Uses of Diaspora 69
conference, and on the introduction of the “diaspora” concept, see Joseph E.
Harris, “Introduction to the African Diaspora,” in Emerging Themes, 146–51;
and Harris, “The International Congress on African History, 1965,” Africa
Forum 1, no. 3 (winter 1966): 80–84.
24. See Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 12–15.
25. In the “diaspora” articles, both Shepperson and Harris call again for
attention to the French influence on discourses of Pan-Africanism and black
internationalism. See Shepperson, “The African Abroad,” 167; Harris, “Introduction,”
149–50. The first work to follow up on this call included Immanuel
Geiss’s 1968 The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America,#p#分页标题#e#
Europe, and Africa, trans. Ann Keep (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1974), especially
the chapter titled “Nationalist Groups in France: The Roots of Négritude,”
305–21; and J. A. Langley, “The Movement and Thought of Francophone Pan-
Negroism: 1924–1936,” which originally appeared in a shorter version in the
Journal of Modern African Studies in 1969 and was later published as chapter 7 of
Langley’s Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945, 286–325.
26. Shepperson, “Introduction,” in The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays,
ed. Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976), 2. I have not yet found an earlier example in print, however.
27. Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Harris,
Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 46.
28. Michael McKeon, review of Keywords, Studies in Romanticism 16 (winter
1977): 133.
29. Shepperson, “Introduction,” 3.
30. St. Clair Drake, “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” in Harris,
Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 358, 373. But see also Drake’s “The
Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective,” Black Scholar 7, no. 1 (September
1975), which is more tentative in its claims: “The diaspora analogy,” he writes,
“like the internal colony analogy, needs constant critical analysis if it is to be a
useful guide to research as well as a striking metaphor” (2). Other work has
equally moved away from the sense of diaspora as a particular kind of intervention:
some have framed the term around questions of foreign policy, while others
have continued to worry the question of the historical and cultural “unity” of the
diaspora, in a vein that might be more properly termed pan-Africanist (e.g., Ruth
Simms Hamilton, “Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” in African Presence in
the Americas, ed. Carlos Moore et al. [Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1995],
393–410).
31. Drake, “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” 353.
32. Ibid., 358–59.
33. Ibid., 343.
34. In other words, part of the reason for the turn to a discourse of diaspora
in the 1960s and 1970s is precisely the growing split in the independence period
between “continental” and “traditional” visions of Pan-Africanism (to use Drake’s
terms). Although certain explicitly “cultural” projects continued to flourish (e.g.,
the 1966 First Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal), the Pan-African movement
reached an impasse at the Sixth Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974, when
delegates from the Americas and delegates from the African continent itself
argued about whether the movement should focus on the concerns of the continent#p#分页标题#e#
as a unit or on the international connections between peoples of African
descent. Drake notes these difficulties (357–59) without reconsidering his con-
70 Brent Hayes Edwards
flation of diaspora and Pan-Africanism, however. Also see the essays around the
1974 congress edited by Horace Campbell, Pan-Africanism: Struggle against Neo-
Colonialism and Imperialism (Toronto: Afro-Carib Publications, 1975); and
Joseph Harris and Slimane Zeghidour, “Africa and Its Diaspora since 1935,” in
General History of Africa, vol. 3: Africa since 1935, ed. Ali A. Mazrui (Berkeley,
Calif.: UNESCO/Heinemann, 1993), 716–17.
35. Joseph E. Harris, “The Dynamics of the Global African Diaspora,” in
The African Diaspora, ed. Alusine Jalloh (College Station: University of Texas at
Arlington, 1996), 14. Although Harris does not cite a source for the phrase, the
original application of mobilized diaspora to the African diaspora appears to be
Locksley Edmondson, “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora: Some International
Implications,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel
Sheffer (London: Croon Helm, 1986), 164–211. Other foreign policy–oriented
work in this vein includes Robert Chrisman, “History of Black Involvement in
International Politics,” in The Non-Aligned Movement in World Politics, ed. A. W.
Singham (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence, Hill, & Co., 1977); John A. Davis, “Black
Americans and United States Policy toward Black Africa,” Journal of International
Affairs 23, no. 2 (1969): 236–49; Yossi Shain, “Ethnic Diasporas and U.S.
Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 109 (winter 1994–95): 811– 41.
36. This is also the period when a discourse of diaspora begins to emerge in
black popular culture. There is not room here, however, to trace the uses of the
term on that level.
37. On black studies as epistemological intervention, see particularly Russell
L. Adams, “Intellectual Questions and Imperatives in the Development of Afro-
American Studies,” Journal of Negro Education 53 (summer 1984): 204. The
essays of Sylvia Wynter offer the most impressive elaboration of this argument.
See, for example, Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the
Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding,
and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 148–49.
38. Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: University
of Sankore Press, 1993), 13.
39. Ibid., 492.
40. James, “The Black Scholar Interviews C. L. R. James,” Black Scholar 2,
no. 1 (September 1970): 43. St. Clair Drake has often pointed out the role of#p#分页标题#e#
diaspora in the institutionalization of black studies: see his “Diaspora Studies and
Pan-Africanism,” 380–84, and his more recent “Black Studies and Global Perspectives:
An Essay,” Journal of Negro Education 53 (summer 1984): 226–42.
41. See Mae G. Henderson, “‘Where, By the Way, Is This Train Going?’ A
Case for Black (Cultural) Studies,” Callaloo 19 (winter 1996): 60 –67; Wahneema
Lubiano, “Mapping the Interstices between Afro-American Cultural Discourse
and Cultural Studies: A Prolegomenon,” Callaloo 19 (winter 1996):
68–77; Manthia Diawara, “Black Studies/Cultural Studies,” in Borders, Boundaries,
and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae G. Henderson
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 202–12; Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue,
and Fables That Stir the Mind,” 193–94, n. 34.
42. The most obvious sources of this critique are The Empire Strikes Back:
Race and Racism in ’70s Britain (London: Hutchinson/Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1982); chapter 2 in Paul Gilroy’s
“There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation
Uses of Diaspora 71
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Stuart Hall’s essay “Culture,
Community, Nation,” Cultural Studies 7 (October 1993): 349–63.
43. In his discussion of Blyden in the final chapter of The Black Atlantic,
Paul Gilroy does cite Shepperson’s essay “African Diaspora: Concept and Context”
but without taking up the introduction of the term itself. Gilroy, The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 211.
44. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian
Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1978) (hereafter cited as PC).
45. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,”
in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980), reprinted in Black
British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and
Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–60.
46. Ibid., 33.
47. Ibid., 38.
48. Other work touching upon the importance of the term in Birmingham
cultural studies includes Jennifer Daryl Stack, “The Theory and Method of
Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996),
112–30, and the interview with Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,”
131–50, in the same volume. Fredric Jameson offers a more idiosyncratic genealogy#p#分页标题#e#
of the term (in his review essay “On ‘Cultural Studies,’” Social Text no. 34
[1993]: 30–33) but elegantly notes the ways the term implies a “poetic” between
the structural and the discursive (32).
49. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community,
Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1990), 235. This approach has been extended by theorists, including Kobena
Mercer and Hazel Carby, who have considered the ways diaspora as an articulated
structure of difference is constituted not only by race and colonization but
also by representation, sexuality, gender, and cultural production.
50. Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack,” 154. On the next page
he writes that “this chapter introduces the study of black cultures within the
framework of a diaspora as an alternative to the different varieties of absolutism
which would confine culture in ‘racial,’ ethnic or national essences.”
51. Indeed, one measure of the book’s influence is the number of formidable
scholars who have felt the need to contest Gilroy’s more provocative propositions
in print. Some of the more significant critiques of The Black Atlantic are Neil
Lazarus, “Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?” Diaspora 4
(winter 1995): 323–39; Ronald A. T. Judy, “Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the
Place(s) of English in the Global,” Critical Quarterly 39 (spring 1997): 22–29;
Laura Chrisman, “Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” Race and Class
39 (October–December 1997): 51–64; the reviews by Brackette F. Williams and
George Lipsitz, Social Identities 1, no. 1 (1995): 175–92 and 192–220, respectively;
and the essays collected in Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (winter
1996), particularly Joan Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes: The
Middle Passage as Metaphor,” 7–14.
52. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 3.
53. See Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travailleur
10 (autumn 1982): 87–121; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, “The
72 Brent Hayes Edwards
Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth
Century,” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (September 1990): 225–52.
54. For cautions in this vein concerning the notion of the “black Atlantic,”
see Colin Palmer’s review in Perspectives 36, no. 6 (September 1998): 24–25, and
Alasdair Pettinger, “Enduring Fortresses—A Review of The Black Atlantic,”
Research in African Literatures 29, no. 4 (winter 1998): 142–47. Philip D. Curtin,#p#分页标题#e#
among others, has argued that the Mediterranean must be considered coextensive
with the Atlantic in terms of the development of the slave trade. He goes so far as
to argue for the “Mediterranean origins of the South Atlantic system”; see
Curtin, “The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Basin: Intercontinental Perspectives,”
in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Huggins, Martin
Kilson, and Daniel Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 75–77.
55. Tommy Lott, “Black Cultural Politics: An Interview with Paul Gilroy,”
Found Object 4 (fall 1994): 56–57.
56. Ibid., 75. Gilroy comments, “If I were going to write the book again, I
would not use modernity as the framework for it.” He notes that in the book he is
interested in a “particular history of modernity,” the one “generated through and
from the systemic and hemispheric trade in African slaves.” That “hemispheric”
focus—the Atlantic, in other words—implicitly leads to the work’s concern with
modernity and the question of origins.
57. Indeed, there is a prior model for precisely this kind of work through the
“diasporic” lens I have been espousing: see Joseph Harris’s “A Comparative
Approach to the Study of the African Diaspora,” in Harris, Global Dimensions of
the African Diaspora, 112–24, which attempts to consider both the African American
presence in Sierra Leone and Liberia and the histories of African communities
in India, Turkey, the Middle East, and Asia. The main source on the latter
part of the African diaspora is of course Harris’s unprecedented The African
Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1971).
58. Earl Lewis, “To Turn As on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a
History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995):
765–87.
59. Senghor, “Problématique de la Négritude” (1971), in Liberté III: Négritude
et civilisation de l’universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 274. The translation is my own.
60. Historian Ranajit Guha is one of the few scholars writing in English
who regularly makes recourse to the term décalage, using it to indicate a structural
overlap or discrepancy, a period of “social transformation” when one class, state
bureaucracy, or social formation “challenges the authority of another that is older
and moribund but still dominant.” Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History
and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 13,
157. See also Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 173, 330.#p#分页标题#e#
61. Ibid., 278.
指导英国assignment-英国assignment指导62. My emphasis on diaspora as a discursive tradition echoes David Scott’s
suggestion that the African diaspora be read less as a culturally unified continuity
than as “embodied disputes” among black populations throughout the globe
about the very meaning of “Africa,” slavery, or black identity. Scott, Refashioning
Futures: Criticism after Postcolonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 123–24.
63. Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” 41.
Uses of Diaspora 73