Connected to the reception area was a small corridor with two additional offices on either side. One was sublet by a Somali women’s organization. Two were called meditation rooms. Both could be used for meditation, but one was more like a counseling room with an easy chair, a wooden, hand-carved West African stool, and a kitchen chair upholstered in black vinyl with white cowry shell symbols. The walls had various African trade bead necklaces with African basketry strewn on a corner table. The other meditation room had indoor/outdoor carpet and several pillows. The fourth room stored exercise equipment.
Framing the entire reception area and down the main corridor was a black-and-white photo exhibit of the people of Powderhorn taken by a professional photographer when the CWC was still in its pilot phase. Forming a border around the three sides of the wall were magnificent photographs of Hmong, Chicano, Latino, White, and African or African American residents of Powderhorn at play and work.
Proceeding to the Invisible College room down the corridor, one went through the kitchen and met a large painting done by Powderhorn children as a special project representing the various people of Powderhorn working together on several neighborhood projects. One side of the Invisible College was lined by long picture windows which allowed passersby to look inside and CWC participants to look out. Sheer white curtains hung from the windows. In front of them were tables filled with plants; there were also large pots of plants and flowers on the floor in front of the window.
On the other side of the Invisible College and through a transparent glass door was a large open exercise and dance room. Many of what the CWC called bodywork classes, like Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial arts form, were held here. In addition to a photo exhibit on Ghanaian medicine, prepared and donated by a European medical doctor and CWC participant chronicling his recent experience studying indigenous medicine, there was a large piece of kente cloth hanging from a corner in the ceiling draped to the new, shiny parquet dance floor. There was also a poster board report on the African origins of Capoeira done by a twelve-year-old student who participated in the African Science Academy, designed to help children of African descent learn about contributions of Africans to science. Rolled up in the corner was floor padding that was used to protect the floor when special events were held.
This large room could hold up to about one hundred people, and it was transformed in many creative ways for a variety of uses. Community groups and foundations frequently rented this room for large meetings. For example, the neighborhood chamber of commerce organized its annual meeting with the community arts group that decorated the room with bright red and blue fabrics and reproductions of Turkish rugs. The visitors left these curtains behind, and during the day they reflected subtle hints of red and blue onto the parquet floors and bright white walls of the room. Tai Chi, African Soul Movement, Yoga, Capoeira, and all of the other group classes that include physical movement were held in this room.
From the Invisible College, one could often see participants practicing many of these activities through the large sliding glass picture windows connecting this teaching and planning room to the exercise room. The Invisible College had conference tables which were creatively arranged for the wide range of activities sponsored by the CWC. When the CWC held a jazz fundraiser, the tables were arranged cafe style and the track lighting was dimmed. With the incense and scented candles burning, the room took on the ambience of an intimate jazz club. The room also had large African masks in shades of brown, beige, red, and black earth that dominated the neutrally colored wall space around them.
The Invisible College led to the CWC’s kitchen, where many meals for meetings and special events were prepared. The two were separated by two large white wooden partitions from which were hung fabrics of many traditions, including a green and yellow African tie-dye and a tapestry with Celtic symbols. The kitchen was recently constructed and had all new appliances. It always seemed to be in use. Between the kitchen and another conference area was a large table, a small computer station, another entrance to the receptionist’s desk area, a photocopier, and a basket of children’s toys. On the walls were two large displays of Malian mud cloth with African basketry and pottery on the window ledges.
The combination of African artifacts with material culture from various communities in its offices was a critical component of the CWC’s effort to create a surrogate sensorial experience of a modern African home that was accessible to all its participants. The space was designed to actively symbolize a new, revitalized “African” culture with a sort of cultural chameleon aesthetic that could successfully adjust to its surroundings, representing itself in different ways as necessary, while retaining some defined fundamental core.
This research describes how this nonprofit organization’s programs and spatial aesthetics interfaced to create an alternative to what it saw as mainstream and Afrocentric approaches to African identity issues, and presents the general lessons it offers for the study of transnational cultural phenomena and public interest anthropology. I see the CWC as a translocal nonprofit in Appadurai’s (1996) sense of the term, because although its facilities are based in one particular locality, in this case Minneapolis’ Powderhorn neighborhood, its work has ramifications across several national boundaries. It is one of several key agents in managing the transnational flow of images and networks of peoples to and from the Twin Cities. I examine what its agenda and activities can tell us about how contemporary African identities are being built. I also explore how we might reform conventional approaches to the study of African diasporan culture in North America to include not only immigrants but also American-born peoples of African descent such as African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.
From the perspective of African diasporan history in the United States, the CWC’s work is not unusual, even though voluntary or nonprofit sector activity has not traditionally been a focus for either Africanist or African Americanist anthropological study. Starting with the formation of African American churches and mutual aid societies in seventeenth century America through the 1960s civil rights and contemporary nongovernmental organizations like TransAfrica Forum, the African diasporan nonprofit sector has been a critical, albeit little studied, forum for people of African descent in the Americas to create new identities and, in some cases, transnational ones. Much of African American cultural production occurs in this independent or third sector as it is sometimes called in the literature. Many of these grassroots initiatives became bases for political action, the historical role of the African American church as well as various pan-African movements being among the most poignant examples.
The African diasporan nonprofit sector, from colonial times in the United States to the present, has much to teach us about how locality, that is, a sense of place or community, and identity are created in conditions of globalization. Afrocentricity is just one of several sometimes conflicting ideologies (for example, variants of pan-Africanism and African diaspora approaches) that have emerged, largely through the collaboration of academics and grassroots activists, to reconcile African Americans’ relationship to Africa—what W. E. B. Du Bois so aptly called the persistent “double-consciousness” of “black folks” in the Americas (see Du Bois 1903/1990).5
Pan-Africanist scholars as early as Du Bois (e.g., 1939, 1990) attempted to define the diaspora as a model for African and African American cultural dynamics. These earlier conceptions of the African diaspora conceived of it as the cultural aggregate of individuals of African descent; the term was used to refer to persons of African descent living outside the African continent as a result of transatlantic slavery and resulting international oppression and racial terror (Padmore 1956; Drake 1982). For various reasons, despite the longstanding scholarly study of African peoples in the Americas as part of a transnational diaspora, a critical discourse on this model only recently became part of the anthropological mainstream (Appiah 1992; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994; Harrison and Harrison 1998; Holtzman and Foner 1999).
In this study, the term “African diaspora” does not refer to any one of the particular current models (e.g., Appiah 1992; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994; Harrison and Harrison 1998). Following Sanchez (1997:61), the term “African diasporan identity” as used in this study applies to a group of people linked by their collective social memory of common historical experiences (for example, slavery,