Even though the scale and intensity of global cultural interchange has accelerated in the contemporary period for America’s African diaspora, these processes are centuries old and begin with the transatlantic slave trade. There are several reasons that despite the prevalence of African diasporan identity formation projects and initiatives in North America’s nonprofit sector, they, and African American cultural production more generally, have until recently received little attention from the discipline of anthropology.
Generally, the complexity of African diasporan cultural dynamics in the New World relegated African American anthropology to a minor role in the discipline. Conventional, place-based notions of culture do not accommodate the complexity of the African American cultural experience.6 Anthropology’s primary focus, in the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, on smaller-scale societies diverted attention from more heterogeneous communities or intercontinental cultural processes. In this context, United States African Americans did not seem exotic enough to warrant serious anthropological attention. Also, because of the historical role of slavery and the contemporary context of racism, studying U.S. African American culture was an inherently political proposition. Thus, even Sidney Mintz (1970:14), a pioneering theorist and ethnographer of the African diaspora in the tradition of Melville Herskovits, acknowledged that the unequal racial power relations and relative cultural familiarity of U.S. African Americans caused him and other African Americanists to study the corresponding African diasporas of the Caribbean and South America and to avoid North America. Although there is increasing recognition of the contributions of African Americans, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, until recently their role in the early formative stages of the discipline has not been fully acknowledged (see Muller 1992; Harrison 1995; Harrison and Harrison 1998; Sanday 1998a). The cumulative effect of these factors has been the field’s relative marginalization of the anthropology of African American cultural processes.
By default and neglect, until the 1970s and 1980s, race became a surrogate for culture in the study of African American identity. During this period, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Hannerz 1969; Stack 1975), African American cultural dynamics received very little serious attention. The core debates centered on whether African Americans truly possessed a distinctive culture or only pathological adjustments to ghetto poverty (e.g., Frazier 1939; Glazer and Moynihan 1965; Lewis 1966; Liebow 1967). The ghetto focus was a comparison of African American families to white middle-class norms, and its emphasis on social problems had the unintended effect of supporting variations of Lewis’s “culture of poverty” theory as a way of describing African American cultural dynamics. The culture of poverty theory also tended to underplay the active role of racism and unequal employment opportunities as factors in producing poverty and supported genetic explanations of African American culture (see Valentine 1968 and Stack 1975 for critiques of the culture of poverty thesis).
The field of anthropology is just beginning serious study of the African immigrant experience in North America (see Stoller 2002). Unfortunately, immigration studies are generally not very helpful in understanding the new immigration or its African variations. Conventionally, North American immigration studies primarily focused on European origins (Gans 1962; Gordon 1964; Anderson 1974; Handlin 1974; Greene 1975; Lopata 1976) and neglected the study of the African diaspora in North America. Immigration studies were dominated by models of ethnicity and assimilation inherent in the “melting pot” theory (Glazer and Moynihan 1965). As noted by several contemporary theorists (e.g., McDaniel 1995), the melting pot theory did not fully take into account some of the unique aspects of race and racism in the African immigrant experience. Any study of African immigrant identity formation needs to address not only ethnicity but also the social reality of North America’s system of racial stratification and African immigrants’ reaction to it. Recent immigration studies expand the conventional assimilationist “melting pot” theory to accommodate the ways ethnicity and race interface and constrain African immigrant identity formation in North America (Alba 1990; Waters 1990; McDaniel 1995; Sanchez 1997).
Scholars are outlining how various groups, particularly immigrants of African descent, negotiate the United States system of racial classification. Omi and Winant (1986:75) define racialization as a process whereby “previously racially undefined groups” are situated within a prevailing racial order. Sanchez (1997:54) notes that immigrants of African descent, in particular, are directly confronted with this system of racial classification; they are often assigned a racialized status as “Black” or “African American,” on the basis of visible and/or suspected African ancestry, without regard to their particular cultural or political histories. In response, so-called Black immigrants and their descendants may negotiate their identity within certain parameters of choice: they may adhere to a binational identity (e.g., “Jamerican”7); or they may align themselves locally with the African American community and globally with the international African diaspora by identifying as Black (see Bryce-Laporte 1972a; Butcher 1994; Foner 1987; Reid 1939; Waters 1990; Woldemikael 1989a, 1989b).
Drawing on exciting new conceptual models that are beginning to emerge as anthropologists address the complexity of contemporary cultural experience (e.g., Massefoli 1996; Ortner 1997b), immigration studies are also now beginning to accommodate the complex transnational interactions that inform contemporary African immigration to North America. For example, Stoller (1996, 2002) chronicles the economic and political impact of a Harlem-based association of native-born African American vendors and transnational African immigrant traders from Niger, Senegal, and the Gambia working in the informal sector (also see MacGaffey 2000). This study seeks to add to anthropology’s very early efforts to understand the lives of African immigrants in America and to examine more closely how identity is being defined and expressed. It elaborates these efforts by expanding upon their primary focus on conflict and competition among various African diasporan groups (for example, African refugees or immigrants versus U.S. born Black Americans) by also examining explicit efforts to promote cooperation and build more inclusive identities between these communities.
Instead of dismissing the CWC’s work as Afrocentric and, therefore, not worthy of serious academic analysis, as a scholar of cultural dynamics I proceed from the assumption that any act of human cultural creativity is a legitimate area of academic study. I reject the notion sometimes proposed in the study of African American culture that diasporan variants of culture which are self-consciously or deliberately created are somehow less authentic than other types of putatively more spontaneous types of cultural production (Herskovits 1937, 1941, 1966, 1971; Herskovits and Herskovits 1934; Herskovits and Herskovits 1936; Apter 1991).8 The unintended and outmoded implication of such approaches is that African Americans, unlike any other grouping of people on the planet, somehow do not have culture per se but instead have surrogates such as race or style (see Hebdige 1979). The CWC and groups like them are engaged in the type of culture-making activity that numerous recent studies over the past twenty years or so (see Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1979; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a) now recognize as implicit in all societies, not just diasporan variants (see also Brandon 1993; Mudimbe 1994; and Barnes 1997 for other examples of African diasporan “culture-making”). There is no reason that African Americans or any other group should be seen as exceptions to what is increasingly recognized as a universal human practice. Following Gupta and Ferguson (1997b:4), instead of taking the notion “African” as a given, I start from the position that all “associations of place, people, and culture are social and historical creations, not natural facts…. Whatever associations of place and culture may exist must be taken as problems for anthropological research rather than the given ground that one takes as a point of departure.” I accept the CWC’s notions of African identity and culture as “true” for its adherents even though their ideas may seem unconventional or misplaced in some academic circles or differ from my own personal views. The study’s essential question is this: How do the people at the CWC who call themselves “African” create, define, express, experience, and promulgate this cultural category?
2
Ethnographic