Firm boundaries between African and African American are increasingly difficult to sustain with the accelerating global flow of peoples and cultures across continents. I hope that this ethnographic study of contemporary African diasporan identity formation in the North American nongovernmental sector contributes to the field’s ongoing journey to help theory and practice catch up to this important piece of African peoples’ cultural reality.
This book is divided into three major sections with chapters that document the CWC’s strategies to create embodied African culture and community. The prologue and Part I, Reimagining North America’s African Diaspora, set the personal, theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, political, and demographic context for the study. Part II, Across Diasporan Space/Time, considers the question: Who is “African” in a world of global cultural flows, meanings, and connections? I present the CWC participants’ sometimes conflicting theories of African identity and the leadership’s attempts to organize them into a coherent theory and practice of African healing and culture. I show how the CWC’s cultural wellness discourse on African identity is an indirect form of resistance to dominant notions of race, class, and culture. Part III, Creating “Africa”: A State of Mind/Body/Spirit, asks the question: How does the CWC promote embodiment of African identity, community, and culture? Specifically, I examine how various support group meetings and movement classes work to transform the CWC’s concepts of diversity into a visceral experience of African wellness and healing that displace territory as the locus of African culture and community. The epilogue to this journey through the Twin Cities African diaspora presents how the context has changed in the post-September 11 period. I also discuss how the CWC case, and the community-based nonprofit sector more generally, might inform theory and practice in our discipline.
Part I
Reimagining North America’s African Diaspora
… as anthropology increasingly abandons the idea that cultures can be treated as integrated wholes … we would do well to look at those African American communities that … defined themselves in neodiffusionist terms as nations apart, diasporas, and transnational communities, long before postcolonial theory made it fashionable to recognize that many non-African communities do so as well.
—J. Lorand Matory, “Revisiting the African Diaspora”
1
“Africa” in Minnesota
The Cultural Wellness Center (CWC) was located on the major commercial strip of the Powderhorn neighborhood, a key crossroads in the Twin Cities’ changing demographic landscape.1 At one time, this busy intersection was a major commercial corridor in midtown Minneapolis. The corridor declined significantly over the past five years as major businesses, for example, a large Sears department store, left the area. No longer called “midtown” Minneapolis in the media, to the chagrin of local activists who emphasized the neighborhood’s notable cultural and socioeconomic assets, the area was popularly referred to as the “inner city.” In the media, the area was, unfortunately, known for its growing violent crime rate and drug trade, although many economic development projects were under way to revitalize it. Local merchants organized with nonprofits to create a business association that promoted the area’s development. There were plans to redevelop the Sears site, several major business and health care facilities anchored the neighborhood’s economy, and there were a growing number of small businesses, including several that were Asian, Chicano, Latino, or African immigrant owned.
Across the street from the CWC was the Lagos International Market and an African music shop. Farther down the block was a Somali recording studio that also sold Somali music and was becoming a community meeting place. Several shops down was an African bookstore owned by a Kenyan immigrant. In an office across from the CWC on the second floor of a drug store was the Association for Hmong Women, which used the CWC’s space for community meetings, youth gatherings, and folk dance classes. There was a Mexican restaurant and an Indian curry house on the same block. About a half block from the CWC’s offices was Ingebretsen’s, a well-known store established in the neighborhood for about eighty years, specializing in Scandinavian foods and handicrafts.2 A couple of blocks up from this store on the same boulevard were various specialty shops patronized by an international clientele including Latino Catholics, African people of various backgrounds (immigrants from different countries as well as American-born), as well as an interethnic group of White American Wiccans, that is, witches, many of whom identified themselves as feminists reconnecting with the lost healing traditions of pre-Christian Europe.
When I first started working in Powderhorn, this daily comingling of aromas—curry, tortillas, and lutefisk—with the sounds of West African high life and Tejano gave this corner of Minneapolis a disorienting, out-of-place, surreal flavor not found in the region until very recently. This is the story of a translocal nonprofit’s effort to create a sense of place—a sense of home—for the many different peoples living in the Twin Cities and its African diaspora.
The CWC was actually located in a bank building owned and operated by a nonprofit housing developer. There were no outdoor signs identifying the center. In fact, the only outdoor signs were those of the bank. Unless you were observant enough to notice the distinctive colorful curtains and large picture windows, one might not even know the CWC was inside.
As you walked into the bank building, you entered double doors into a hallway. On one side there was the bank—a rather small neighborhood branch—distinguished by very large and colorful papier-mache masks suspended from the bank ceiling and made by a local community arts group just a block away from the CWC.3 As you proceeded down the corridor, you would sometimes notice the aroma of sage or jasmine incense burning from the offices of the CWC, an unusual combination of smells for a bank building. Off the corridor there was an 8½” by 11” sign marking the CWC’s entrance.
The smell of incense intensified once you opened the CWC’s doors. On a typical day, there was an intoxicating blend of smells that one does not usually experience when visiting nonprofit offices and certainly not bank offices. Sage, jasmine, or other incense intermingled with the aromas of red beans and rice and cornbread cooking in a very homey kitchen at the back of the CWC between the formal conference room and the Invisible College where many classes and other large meetings were held.4
The reception area was adorned with African sculpture and textiles (see photographs in Appendix B), on loan from an African art gallery owned by an Ethiopian woman who was an active CWC supporter, and a shrine to European women killed during the witch burnings in medieval Europe. The reception desk had a glassless storefront window design with a ledge from which a long piece of bright yellow, purple, and red handwoven silk kente cloth from Ghana was hung. On the ledge were various small African sculptures, some from South Asia, and above the ledge were several ornate Guru masks. The office was usually very dim and there were typically scented or unscented candles burning on the reception area ledge and throughout the room giving the front reception area a calming ambience. Behind the ledge was a standard office desk used by the administrative assistant, a computer, printer, fax machine, and photocopier.
The rather large reception area was set up like a living room, with a comfortable sofa and two side chairs. Large and small vases with fragrant dried flowers or candles adorned the cocktail table and open spaces. Surrounding the reception area were small offices where the full-time staff worked. Children of all ages were often in the reception area, and their joyous drone could also be heard during meetings; children even sometimes came to adult classes. They were welcome, and the staff, particularly African leaders, often graciously integrated the babies, especially, into the meetings, by carrying and bouncing them in their arms, even occasionally