A Diaspora is the scattering of people away from their homelands; typically they are forced away from these lands for one reason or another. The world has witnessed many Diasporas in its time since the development of nations. The effects of the Diasporas have usually been ignored even though they continue to hurt both those directly subjugated and those who don’t even know they have been affected. Each Diaspora has created tension as well as unity within the people who are affected. The African Diaspora, for example, in the beginning caused a lot of unity by those who were forced away from their homeland. However, as the Diaspora progressed and developed many of those who were removed from their homeland began to discriminate others due to
This caused by the misunderstandings of those who left against those who have lived in said place their entire life. Unfortunately the Diaspora continues even to modern day but for different reason than when it initially began. In the modern day the Diaspora has evolved from forced slavery into a different kind of forced movement whether for education, opportunity or refugee. When the African Diaspora began many of those who were being moved away from their homelands didn’t really understand what was going on. As they began to realize they were not going to be able to return to their homeland they tried to find ways to connect to their origins. This can be seen in “Domingos Alvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World” by James H. Sweet. In the novel we follow an African slave who goes by the name of Domingos Alvares who uses health and healing to connect to his ancestors. Besides using his abilities
Those whose parents moved away from Africa for one reason or another seem to have very different experiences than others. This causes a lot of disconnection between all afro mixtures in many countries. This is evident in Tina Campts’ “The Crowded Space of Diaspora: Intercultural Address and the Tensions of Diasporic Relation,” where Campt interviewed Peter, whose name wasn’t fully disclosed, and discussed their upbringings. Peter reveals that he had only accepted the interview because of the fact that Campt herself was black as well. However, even though she is indeed black the larger matter was peter felt as if he could relate to her because of it. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true, Campt and Peter had two very different experiences in the respective communities they were from which led Campt to feel quite uncomfortable in moments where Peter made assumptions about her experiences with his. Campt had graduated from an Ivy League university, whereas, Peter had been working on the railroads. This disconnect between Peter and Campt isn’t as rare as they seem to be. Through personal experiences it seems that many people, though have generally experienced the same kinds of misfortunes, have made it to a place where they can no longer connect with others. These different kinds of experience tend to cause a lot of tension within a community of people who have been treated poorly. This tension
Chapter six of “Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora” is entitled “Asserting the Right to Be”. This chapter explores the rebellion of enslaved Africans and their descendants. It stresses that fact resistance against slavery and oppression have been present from the very beginning of the slavery and it has grown and evolved over time. One point in particular that the chapter discusses is the rise in the number of slave revolts in the early 1500’s. Another important topic that is discussed is the fact that people of African descent not only had to fight against slavery but they also had to fight the concept that an african ancestry was a mark of inferiority.
In Brent Hayes Edwards essay, “ The Use of Diaspora”, the term “African Diaspora” is critically explored for its intellectual history of the word. Edward’s reason for investigating the “intellectual history of the term” rather than a general history is because the term “is taken up at a particular conjecture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work” (Edwards 9). At the beginning of his essay Edwards mentions the problem with the term, in terms of how it is loosely it is being used which he brings confusion to many scholars. As an intellectual Edwards understands “the confusing multiplicity” the term has been associated with by the works of other intellectuals who either used the coined or used the term African diaspora. As an articulate scholar, Edwards hopes to “excavate a historicized and politicized sense of diaspora” through his own work in which he focuses “on a black cultural politics in the interwar, particularly in the transnational circuits of exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Negritude Fran cophone activity in the France and West Africa”(8). Throughout his essay Edwards logically attacks the problem giving an informative insight of the works that other scholars have contributed to the term Edwards traces back to the intellectual history of the African diaspora in an eloquent manner.
The Kenyan feminist and environmental activist, Wangari Maathai, explores the legacy of colonialism and oppression in her native country through her moving 2006 memoir, Unbowed. Maathai explains that over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Africa experienced a massive influx of white settlers. In an effort to solidify control over recently acquired colonies, many European powers had encouraged large numbers of their ethnically white citizens to make a new home on the African continent. As a result, thousands of native Africans were displaced. Maathai’s ancestors, the Kikuyu and Maasai peoples were among them. The majority of these forced dislocations took place in the highland regions. The rich soil and temperate climate of this area had proven attractive to native African peoples for centuries; and it seemed the new British settlers found it equally tempting. After most of the land’s original occupants were transported to the Rift Valley region of western Kenya, settlers began taking advantage of the highlands’ vast natural resources. The land was essentially ravaged as ancient forests were clear-cut in order to make room for agricultural plots. The introduction of the plantation system, with its non-native plant species, large-scale hunting, and systematic recruitment of Africans as field laborers, signaled the next phase in the oppression of native Africans (Maathai 6-9).
Afrocentricity, as defined by Asante, is a “consciousness, quality of thought, mode of analysis, and actionable perspective where Africans seek, from agency, to assert subject place within the context of African history” (Asante 16). In essence, all roads converge and diverge with the African continent, with its rich history of pioneering triumphs and profound tribulations; Africa and all of her descendants are the end all, be all of one’s focus. There are five criteria to Afrocentricity: “(1) An interest in psychological location; (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place; (3) the defense of African cultural elements; (4) a commitment to lexical refinement; (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the ...
Migrations have taken place by slaves and by free people of sub-Saharan Africa for over seventy thousand years, beginning with the tropical areas of the Old World and followed by Eurasia and the Americas. These migrations, or Diasporas, began with religious voyages and cultural exchanges and evolved to the slave trade and the deportation of black men, women and children to new colonies as workers and servants. Long before the Atlantic slave trade grew, merchants from Greece and the Roman Empire traveled to the East African coast. Patrick Manning points out in, African Diaspora: A History Through Culture, that migrants came from southern Arabia to Eretria and Ethiopia in the first millennium BCE (Manning 36). As time went on, contacts grew with other regions of Africa and trade developed with Asia and Europe. This resulted in further migrations of black Africans as both slaves and free men. The Africans brought with them customs, music food preparation techniques and minerals. For example, the discovery of copper in Central Africa brought about a substantial trans-Saharan trade and more exchange of culture and migrations. As more Africans migrated to various parts of the world, they carried with them their culture and learned new techniques and ways of life. Whether they migrated as slaves or as free men, the Africans influenced their new lands and African identity was influenced forever. This paper will look at the effects of these migrations on African identity throughout the Diaspora. It will examine migration patterns, issues of race, racial hierarchy and culture.
Slave’s masters consistently tried to erase African culture from their slave’s memories. They insisted that slavery had rescued blacks form the barbarians from Africa and introduced them to the “superior” white civilization. Some slaves came to believe this propaganda, but the continued influence of African culture in the slave community added slave resistance to the modification of African culture. Some slaves, for example, answered to English name in the fields but use African names in their quarters. The slave’s lives were filled with surviving traits of African culture, and their artwork, music, and other differences reflected this influence.
Although, the Civil war brought about change for Africans, along with this change it brought heart ache, despair and restriction of worship to the African...
As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes a narrative of the past in the Diaspora which is distinctly negative, drawing on images of the Jewish people as passive and parasitic, alienated from nature and labor and accordingly without a living culture. Through his ideology, Gordon establishes an idea of the perfect relationship between people, nature and labor; a relationship that must be withheld in order for a people to be a living, creative culture. Gordon asserts that the Jewish people have been kept apart from the natural sphere in their own land in which they developed as a people, and have been severed from direct contact with nature in the countries where they are living in Diaspora, thus creating a strictly negative identity for the Diasporic Jews. The Diaspora experience is presented by Gordon as an identity defining experience that is presupposed as part of the Jewish self-understanding. The ideology of Gordon indicates that the Diaspora was a degrading and negative experience for all Jews:
While I never knew my father, I did grow to know the challenges faced by African Americans. I first began to feel different when I transferred from public to private middle school. People began asking about my ethnicity for the first time in my life. Until this time, it had never seemed important. Although I had never been overly fond of my curly hair, it, along with other traits deemed too 'ethnic' looking, now became a source of shame. I had a few not so affectionate nicknames because of those curls. I was shocked to realize that people considered me different or less desirable because of these physical traits. Being turned away from an open house in my twenties was just as shocking as being ...
When Africans were brought to America during slavery they were forced to give up most of their heritage and were usually separated from their families. This common occurrence usually brought about tremendous pain and grief to the slaves. “West Africa family systems were severely repressed throughout the New World (Guttmann, 1976)”. Some slaves tried to continue practices, such as polygamy, that were a part of traditional African cultures but were unsuccessful. However, they were successful in continuing the traditional African emphasis on the extended family. In the extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents played important roles. Slaves weren’t allowed to marry, but they didn’t let that stop them, they created their own marriages. And through all the hardships they had placed on them, they developed strong emotional bonds and family ties. The slaves discouraged casual sexual relationships and placed a lot emphasis on marriage and stability. To maintain some family identity, parents named their children after themselves or other relatives or sometimes gave them African names.
The concept diaspora was derived from Greek and means the migration, movement, or scattering of people from their homeland that share the some links or common cultural elements to a home whether real or imagined. The reason why the term ‘diaspora’ is important to understand and is useful because it refers not only because its linked and refers to globalization, linking and connecting place, social consequences of migration, but also, to a form of consciousness and an awareness of home at a more personal level. The feelings, relationships and identities that is often very deeply meaningful to migrants. (Raghuram and Erel, 2014, p. 153 -
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
“Migration uproots people from their families and their communities and from their conventional ways of understanding the world. They enter a new terrain filled with new people, new images, new lifeways, and new experiences. They return … and act as agents of change.” (Grimes 1998: 66)
The experiences of the women of the African diaspora are as diverse as the regions they have come to inhabit. Despite the variety in their local realities, African and African-descended women across the planet share in many common experiences. Wherever they have made their homes, these women tend to occupy inferior or marginalized positions within their societies. Whether in the United States, Europe, Latin America, or even Africa itself, black women must confront what Patricia Hill Collins describes as a “matrix of domination” which has, for centuries, perpetuated their subjugation and oppression. According to Collins, a matrix of domination is a comprehensive social organization in which intersecting oppressions are created and maintained (Collins 246). Although these systems are manifested differently depending on the cultural context in which they were birthed, most have similar origins. In the cases of both Africa and the United States, the most salient factor in the development of oppressive orders is the widespread European colonization which took place from the sixteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. This historic domination of Africans and their descendants, combined with the near-universal presence of patriarchy in human cultures, have worked together to place black women among the most oppressed groups worldwide.
Edward Said, defines exilic consciousness as the “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: it’s essential sadness can never be surmounted” (“Reflections on Exile”, 173).He also notes that though the exilic condition is not new, being prevalent from the time when kings banished unlawful subjects, our own times is truly the age of the “the refugee, the displaced person” (ibid, 174). The twentieth and the twenty first centuries have witnessed different types of mass migrations and dislocations owing to myriad reasons ranging from ethnic cleansing, persecution by totalitarian regimes, and threats of genocide to causes like economic and educational advancements. These composite displacements