Читать книгу Creating Africa in America - Jacqueline Copeland-Carson - Страница 11

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“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 directing baby talk to them as they facilitated meeting discussion. Meeting participants did not seem disturbed or irritated by the integration of children into official activities, as it seemed to be a part of CWC culture.

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, racial terror, migration) as well as some aspects of common African ancestry, whether “imagined,” acknowledged, or denied. Instead of presuming that African diasporan identity is necessarily rooted in geography, “race,” or a predetermined notion of culture, this study presents its composition and dynamics as a research problem to be studied.

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?