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.
No comments:
Post a Comment