"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.