"Transatlantic Reinstatements" and the Black Atlantic

Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit functions within the well articulated contours of the project to trace African cultural survivals in the Americas. Rather then survivals, or recreations, Thompson prefers the concept of "transatlantic reinstatements." (32) By which Thompson means culture modes and practises that are "at once African-inspired and indigenously created." Well leaning strongly towards the African-retention model of Herskovits, Thompson seeks a way out of the historiographical swamp with the idea of reinstatement. Existing as both, these practises can have African roots but in contemporary, and historical, practice has lost any conscious trace of their African roots. (197)
Thompson's work is nothing if not enthusiastic. His writing leaps off the page with the excitement of someone who genuinely loves the objects and art forms he is discussing. Thompson has an axe to grind. As he argues of Yoruba culture "pulsing with ceaseless creativity richly stabilized by precision and control, will safeguard the passage of its people through the storms of time," and perhaps also the Middle Passage. Thompson is quick to pass value judgments on cultures, and praise the sensibilities of those African cultures that he finds ample survivals of in the Americas. One wonders about those African cultures that were not so robust.
Rather than focus on music, or dance, or food ways, Thompson's emphasis on material culture and visual arts (made things) is powerful in his attempt to trace specific cultures in the diaspora. His reading of Mande bottle trees or Yoruba Iron is compelling and hard to dismiss. He has a tendency, however, to essentialize cultures and intuit relatively fixed aesthetic ideas to cultures across broad space and time. For instance the idea of coolness in Yoruba culture or the Mande "search for simplicity." (196) I am typically quite skeptical of this generalized application of cultural modes.
Thompson's basic argument is hard to dismiss and his reading of art and material culture is compelling as are the transatlantic routes he traces. His decoupling of his sources from time (rarely is an object or a text dated when cited) causes a traditional historian to feel ill at ease.

The Black International and the Caribbean Diaspora

In her article in From Toussaint to Tupac, Lara Putnam begins with a notable observation, a large number of the seminal figures in early pan-African thought were from the Caribbean (among them Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams). Putnam links this development to a specific historical moment--the post world war period--and a particular theme, movement. During this period a large number of people from the Anglophone West Indies migrated and moved throughout the Atlantic and circum-Caribbean, from Harlem to Venezuela. The common experiences of anti-black racism and colonial exploitation they encountered laid the ground work for organizations of mutual aid and international cooperation. Even as Afro-Caribbeans moved throughout the circum-Caribbean world, they remained tied together through the black press and interchange of perspectives and ideas.
Putnam's historical actors definitely fit the bill of black international thought laid out in the introduction, "at the core of black internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental, or oceanic boundaries." Putnam, however, grounds this particular outpouring of black international and pan-African thought in a historically specific context in both space and time. The concept of black internationalism is productive in placing this movement in a broader framework, but Putnam resists the tendency to force events, ideas, and people to fit an established model. Her Caribbean internationalism remains historically specific.
While situating her work within the framework of black internationalism, Putnam also articulates the ways that the specific experience of the Caribbean diaspora shaped the articulation of black internationalism. Where ever they moved throughout the hemisphere, Afro-Caribbeans faced discrimination. Their continued interchange and sheer variety of ways in which they experienced discrimination led to the articulation of who was considered within the we who was under attack. Black Caribbean thinkers emphatically defined we as "the Negro race." (123)
Putnam's work is a clear example of the usefulness of concepts like black internationalism to historical inquiry but her work is also a reminder that concepts can never drive the narrative. Regional, historical, and chronological specificity must remain paramount in understanding the motivation and goals of individual historical agents.

Comparing Race Relations, Comparing Nations

Marx's in Making Race and Nation is concerned with the interconnected projects of nation-state creation and the creation of formal structures of racial domination. Marx' work encourages us to reflect on the value of comparative approaches and untangle the complex web of race, racism, and racial identity.
While not reducing race and racism to a formulaic process, Marx suggests a schematic understanding of making race and nation. Racist practises of slavery lay the ground work for states to create post-emancipation institutions of racial domination, racial domination leads to racial identity by the oppressed, which leads to protest and resistance that undermine systems of racial domination. Marx traces the workings of this process in three sites: the United States, South Africa, and Brazil.
Marx's choice is justified both by the seeming "natural" comparisons, between the United States and Brazil and the United States and South Africa. Clearly, the United States is the axis on which Marx' comparison pivots. These choices are not accidental but intended to reveal a key point. If, as Marx argues, the United States and Brazil began from similar slave pasts they ended with radically distinct legacies related to legal systems of racial domination. In contrast, the United States and South Africa had quite different beginnings but settled on a similar system of racial domination. To explain this discrepancy, Marx examines the dynamics of intra-white political struggle in the creation of each nation. As Marx argues the origins of racial domination lay in the national and nationalist histories of the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, not necessarily in their racial pasts.
This, then, is Marx key interpretive contribution. For Marx, to understand the dynamics of "race relations" and racial domination one need not necessarily compare the racial pasts of the societies and nation-states in question. Rather, it is in comparing national histories that the roots of racial domination lie. Intra-white and nationalistic dynamics determined when it was useful for elites to foster a system of racial domination and when it was not. This insight encourages a broader frame of comparison. It is not merely the race relations of nation-states that need to be compared, but the nation-states themselves and the ways that their histories made race and racism and they in turn were made by racial domination.

Writing Women: Writing Diaspora

In a classic article on "Women's History," Joan Wallach Scott unpacks the ways in which histories of women have been written and the potential of writing future histories. (See Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 15-27). Scott begins by deconstructing what she identifies as the "her-story" approach to writing women's history. This approach in its most basic form seeks to undercover the lives and actions of women in the past and to privilege previously marginalized stories. At its most sophisticated, her-story moves behind merely a "women also" approach, that shows how women were active in established historical events, but shows how attention to women's agency reframes our understanding of these events and redraws boundaries and chronologies.
Alongside her-story, Scott also considers a project to realize "the radical potential of women's history" which would entail moving beyond writing women's experiences but would also "analyze the ways in which politics construct gender and gender constructs politics." (27)
Keisha Blain's Set the World on Fire examines women within the black nationalist movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Scott, I chose to approach this book with the question in mind, is this her-story or does it speak to the radical potential that Scott identified. I think the work is a bit of both. One crucial point that Blain insists upon throughout the book is that not only were black women present at all phases of black nationalist organizing and theorizing, they were central players in its formation. By centering women, Blain redraws the boundaries and chronology of the black nationalist movement. Rather than restrict her analysis to the Golden Age of black nationalism prior to the deportation of Garvey and the collapse the UNIA, Blain sees this closure as an opening for more opportunities for black women to express new and innovative formulations of black nationalism. Likewise, Blain centers working and working-poor women in her narrative rather than merely a cadre of relatively well-off and well connected leaders. Both perspectives redefine what the black nationalist movement was and the general contours of the movement's history.
Blain's discussion of the Garvey movement moves in the direction described by Scott as the radical potential of women's history. Rather than describe an un-gendered Black Liberation or Black Nationalist movement a women's variant thereof, Blain centers gender at the construction of Garvey's conception of black liberation. Garvey articulated a "masculinist vision of black liberation." (12) Gender was thus constitutive of black nationalist politics even as black nationalist politics was central to some black women's constructions and expressions of gender. The two, for Blain, cannot be neatly severed. In this way, Blain's work transcends the her-story paradigm and reveals how analysis of gender is inseparable from analysis of the black nationalist movement.

Diasporic Tuskegee

Few institutions hold as much symbolic power in the post-emancipation United States than Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee institute represented one major center of African American thought and response to the disintegration of black rights and imposition of Jim Crow. The story of Tuskegee is often an American story.
Frank Andre Guridy, however, situates Tuskegee within a broader diasporic context. The institute was far more than a fixture in the Jim Crow South or the national consciousness of the United States but was an important and contested symbol in within the African diaspora. Guridy uses Cuban students at Tuskegee to examine both the school and its founder as diasporic subjects. This move brings Tuskegee out of the scholarly morass of historical debates over accomodationism vs integrationism (vs perhaps radicalism). Tuskegee was criticized by many African Americans and people of the African diaspora, including students of the institution, but the school was more than the sum of the debates. Despite criticism, students continued to come to Tuskegee to seek their own purposes, outcomes were more than the structure of the school might indicate.
Guridy's move is useful for broadening the scope of inquiry into black agency and transnational diasporic identities. Tuskegee meant many things to many people. The school's model appealed to both Afro-Cuban intellectuals, Pan-Africanists, and British colonizers, and American segregationists. By decentering Jim Crow and the United States from the discussion of Tuskegee to examine its transnational and diasporic meaning the institution's meaning becomes more contingent and contested. The process of diasporic imagining is a useful lens for broadening and deepening the history of institutions, people, and events that we thought we knew and had slotted into our national narratives.

Culture, Politics, and Emancipation in Brazil

Two salient factors are apparent in any consideration of the results of the African diaspora: the cultural importance of African diasporic communities in the Americas, and the historical quest for meaningful political power by African American communities. In Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won, Kim Butler explorers the importance of the cultural and the political in two Brazilian cities, Sao Paulo and Salvador.
Butler's discussion highlights important ways of discussing the intersection of culture and politics. In Sao Paulo, Butler finds a racial politics united Afro-Brazilians into pursuing political objectives. In Salvador, however, political actions were less viable, but Afro-Brazilians pursued a culture confrontation to marginalization. Butler argues that "underlying objectives" of Brazilians in both cities were the same despite differed methods (133).
Butler's work destabilizes any sharp dichotomy between the cultural and political. This is an important point with a wider application than simply post-emancipation urban Brazil. Butler shows how differing political, demographic, and economic realities shaped how emancipated people chose to challenge hegemonic control. This moves the analysis of culture well beyond the simple quest for Africanisms. Culture comes to be analyzed as a site for self-determination and challenge to existing systems of power. This is not a wholly new or unique approach to culture, but Butler provides a nuanced reading of how cultural challenges operated. It is not simply that Africans and African descended people reached for cultural solutions for self-expression but that they used culture to mount a thinly veiled challenge to predominate social, political, and economic relations. Through cultural expressions like carnival, Afro-Brazilians contested public space and openly displayed "Africanisms" in a political context that rejected blackness and Africanness in the pursuit of "order and progress."

Talking about Slavery

Jane G. Landers' Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions is a wide ranging work that uncovers the life histories of numerous extraordinary individuals throughout the Atlantic World. The emphasis on the exceptional, however is thorny and highlights the importance of how we talk about slavery and especially enslaved and formerly-enslaved people who stray beyond the bounds of a "typical" slave experience.

Landers work is problematic in two regards. First, her language when discussing those who attained some degree of meaningful freedom casts a troubling shadow on those who did not. Second, Landers assumes a quite easy and seamless process of acculturation and cultural fluency.

When discussing one "atypical experience," that of Juan Bautista Whitten, Landers notes that Whitten "did not let slavery define him." (16) Later in the conclusion of the work, Landers sums up the lives of those who "by their wits and their courage... read shifting political landscapes" and made "daring choices" to strike for freedom. (235). There is no reason to doubt that the people Landers studies were courageous and possessed great wit. However, while reading her work one is left with the troubling impression that those who remained chained in slavery were someone lacking in some regard. Why didn't more enslave people make the choices Whitten made? Was it lack of Wit? Daring? A resignation to "let" slavery define one's life. Landers' emphasis on black agency has perhaps created a false image of opportunity. The political landscape was shifting, and these seismic shifts opened up new spaces for the meaningful realization of freedom or a few. But for the many, such opportunities remain at best a dream.

My second point of contention with Landers is the shocking ease and inevitability with which she surmises cultural exchange occurred. When discussing the free black militia corporal Benjamin Wiggins, Landers suggests that his English father and Senegalese wife alongside his upbringing among the Seminoles and occasional journeys through Spanish America made him "at home in the English, Senegalese, Spanish, and Seminole cultures." (112) While Atlantic Creoles did show a remarkable degree of cultural knowledge, I am skeptical that there mere fact of a British planter father or occasional boat trips through Spanish America could make one "at home" in four separate cultures. Likewise Landers claims that the Black Seminole Abraham "would have been familiar with Spanish law and society" because he was once owned by a Spanish physician in Pensacola. (175) For Landers, contact implies acculturation and a depth of cultural interchange that could make one "at home" in that culture. This seems like quite a lot to infer from the mere fact of contact.

On Being Akan in the Americas

Recent studies of the African diaspora have revealed the ability of historians and anthropologists to trace the diasporic experiences of specific African groups and ethnicities in the Americas (Rucker, 2015; Heywood and Thornton 2007). By employing new methods and sources, scholars have been able to move beyond a quest for "Africanisms" to track cultural transmission from specific points in African among specific enslaved populations in the Americas.

Kwasi Konadu's, Akan Diaspora in the Americas offers a unique approach to discussing a specific diaspora within the African diaspora. Much of the promise of work's like Konadu's lies with the nuance that can be provided by isolation one African ethnicity within Africa, the Atlantic, and American frames of reference. Konadu, however, takes a particular view of culture that divorces his book from other works operating in the same intellectual space. For Konadu, Akan-ness is an enduring cultural marker largely unbounded by historical time. Culture in Akan Diaspora is largely ahistorical and extends fundamentally unchanged across five centuries. This makes Konadu's work feel like something of a missed opportunity. Konadu largely reduces individuals to culture, indeed he argues "people, ultimately, are nothing but their culture" and the "pragmatics of day-to-day living, collective ideas, or spiritual strivings are cultural history." (16)

This perspective limits Konadu's ability to do what Walter Rucker does in Gold Coast Diasporas by tracing the cultural adaptations of enslaved Africans to their new environments and social conditions. Culture for Konadu is static and fixed and his project is not to examine the Akan experience of diaspora, or how Akan people interpreted diaspora through their unique culture lens. Rather, Konadu seeks to locate "the Akan variable in the African diasporic equation." The study of the Akan then tells us something about the African diaspora, rather than revealing a particular experience of the diaspora.

West African Diasporas

Like in his earlier seminal work, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, John Thornton and Linda Heywood's Central Africans rest on a simple premise, the Americas during the period of Atlantic expansion were more of an African than a European periphery. Operating from this premise, the authors spend the majority of a book about the foundation of the Americas within the geographic confines of the African continent.
In Thornton and Heywood's telling the slave trade was fueled by European demand but the contours of the trade, those who were enslaved, and their cultural traits were shaped by trends within Africa. This is not to say that the authors assign agency or responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade to Africans rather than Europeans, but they emphasize the ways in which Europeans were forced to reckon with the reality of African power and could not engage in slaving precisely as they wished.
Creolization, in this account was not the product of European enslavement but likewise had its roots in Africa. The rise of Atlantic creoles was not an indication of European hegemony but was at times freely chosen by Africans for their own political, economic, and nationalistic interests. Especially within Kongo the adoption of Christianity, European language, and writing were no way imposed. The author's major contribution is to conceive of the birth of African American culture not simply with Africans, or Africanisms, but within Africa.

Comparative Slavery

The roots of the comparative study of slavery rest on the now largely discredited project of fixing the relative violence and destructive of differing national systems of enslavement. This project was largely kick started by Frank Tannenbaum's 1947, Slave and Citizen. In this slim work, Tannenbaum argued that slavery in the Spanish world was less onerous and violent than Anglo-American slavery. Tannenbaum rooted this argument in a discussion of the law and religion. Prior to American colonization, Spanish law and its Roman predecessors had included slaves within the system of law. Likewise, the Catholic church encouraged (and at times demanded) the baptism and conversion of enslaved persons. For Tannenbaum, the fact that slaves in Iberian America existed at legal persons (and therefore imperial subjects) and coreligionists tempered the power of masters and provided for a more benign slavery. Crucially, Spanish law gave enslaved persons a path to manumission and self-purchase.
So much for Tannenbaum.
While Tannenbaum's specific points can--and have been--debated, more recent scholars have largely shifted away from his interpretive framework.
For this week I focused on the suggested reading, Richard S. Dunn's Tale of Two Plantations. Dunn compares two plantations, one in Virginia (Mount Airy) the other in Jamaica (Mesopotamia). Dunn's initial foray into this work in the 1970s operated within the Tannenbaum framework, an approach Dunn now rejects as misguided. Instead, Dunn proposes to use comparison more as a method than as an end goal. In Two Plantations Dunn uses the differences and similarities that emerge from comparative method as indicators of the importance of specific features of each system of slavery. If two plantation cultures within a broadly similar Anglo-American plantation complex show sharp contrasts, it is a strong indication of the importance of these differences and their constitutive roles in the plantation structures that arose.
Dunn focuses on two primary differences between these two plantation cultures: demography and trajectory. In Jamaica, the brutal regime of sugar manufacture lead to appalling death rates that required planters to continually import slaves to maintain a stable population and labor force. Virginia could not have been anymore different, the climate and crop culture of Virginia required smaller labor forces and ensured a population that grew due to natural increase. This demographic difference had profound influence on the slave cultures that appeared in both places. In Jamaica slave communities had to reckon with frequent deaths within their numbers and the continued arrival of newcomers. In Virginia, separation and sale, not death, was the defining feature.

In general I find Dunn's use of the comparative method more fruitful than direct comparative methods of the approach of Tannenbaum. However, comparative approaches have the danger of disregarding influence. Dunn's two examples do not line up chronologically, and perhaps a more fruitful venture is to look for how the experience of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica shaped the theory and practice of slavery in the United States. Such an approach opens more doors to transnational explorations and explanations.

The Numbers Game

Of all the topics we are to cover in seminar, the Atlantic slave trade is the one I know best. A year ago I did a historiography for Emily Clark's Atlantic World seminar on the project of quantifying the slave trade and the use and misuse of quantitative history in discussing slavery and diaspora.

Therefore, I am more acquainted with Curtin and Eltis than I would perhaps like to be.

While Curtin's project was a game changer in the study of Atlantic/American/European (I still haven't decided which term I prefer) slavery, it was equal parts mainstream and innovative. Curtin's work was only a smaller part of a broader shift toward quantitative history--think Fogel & Engerman  or the New England town studies (Greven especially) for the US or Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran for Mexico. This shift toward cliometrics was driven by an attempt to emphasize the conception of history as a social science and as a means to get at history from below. If subalterns left only minor traces in the archival record, perhaps by aggregating them into large data sets we could say something about their lives and experiences.

Unlike some cliometricians, Curtin was more circumspect and admitted the fallacy of assuming that numbers were "more 'scientific' and reliable than other kinds of data." (Curtin, 272) The aspect of Curtin's work that attracted the most attention and controversy, his new aggregate estimate for the scale of the slave trade, is, in my estimation, the least interesting aspect of his work.

Curtin's data set reveals several important trends. For instance, Curtin shows conclusively that their were major ebbs and flows in the source of enslave person over time. Regions, ports, and empires entered, left, and reentered the slave trade. Curtin's numbers do not explain this, but they do reveal it. This revelation invites further inquiry into the causes--European, African, and American--that led to these developments. Likewise, the revelation that the slave trade was not random--Africans from specific regions were brought en masse to specific places--has great relevance for how we conceive of diaspora. That slave ships did not bring disaggregated masses of people, but rather, people who shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic traits, has important bearings on the discussion of Africanisms and retentions in the Americas that preoccupied Herskovitz, Price, and Mintz. Again, however, the revelations of the data are suggestive and not final.

Numbers tell a story of the Atlantic slave trade, they do not tell THE story.

Conceiving of Diaspora

The African dispora is a historical phenomenon of almost unfathomable scale, involving millions of people, multiple continents, and half a millenium of human history. This grand human event, however, was comprised of countless smaller diasporas. Every slave ship, every port, every planation was a diaspora unto itself.
My understanding of diaspora is essentially an exploration of how the individual movements of particular Africans to particular places and particular community and cultural formations shaped the history of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. This is a story of deep personal stories and large-scale historical processes. The tension between these two modes of discussion, and the necessity to not lose the human in the discussion of hemispheric movements are central to how I conceive of diaspora.
Having encountered Herskovitz and Gomez in prior courses I am familiar with their approach to the stduy of the African Diaspora and their work has shaped my understanding. The piece by White, however, reminded my to watch my frame of reference. Due to my research interests I tend to think of diaspora as a past event, and the present as perhaps the aftermath of diaspora. A tricky distinction, but I think a vital one.

What This Blog is For/Why I am in this Class

My interest in the African diaspora stems primarily from my interest in the American [read United States] South. Any understanding of the South historically, or presently, must begin and end with a reckoning with slavery and race. Slavery and racism are undoubtedly a national crime/experience, but in the South slavery began first, lasted longest, and shaped the culture most deeply. The post-emancipation reckoning with the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the South cemented the centrality of the African American experience for understanding Southern history.

My particular sub-field, the history of education, must likewise begin with W.E.B. DuBois' observation that "public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea." What became of this "Negro idea" in the years between the Civil War and the Progressive Era (say 1920) is my main interest.

I see this course as an opportunity to explore some of the themes that preoccupy my own research in a broader chronological and geographic (and perhaps methodological) focus. When Americans in the 1860 thought about emancipation they thought about two things: Haiti and the British West Indies. At no time was America as insular or exceptional as a glance at the US history section of the library might suggest. I hope to explore aspects of the black experience in the Americas not so much in a comparative perspective, but a transnational one. To examine how ideas, people, and experiences flowed into and shaped one another and what the broader experience of diaspora(s) can tell us about the African American experience in the US South.

Intro

Hello, friends and classmates.

This is my blog for our Africans in the Americas seminar.

I will chart things related to our weekly readings and maybe occassional rantings on my semester paper.

Cheers,
Jason