Читать книгу Creating Africa in America - Jacqueline Copeland-Carson - Страница 9

Prologue to a Diasporan Journey

Suddenly a woman, who seemed African American, stood up in the middle of a moderated session at a daylong conference called “Understanding African Refugees in Our Community.” Dressed in a West African factory-print head tie with bubba and wrapper, her emotionally charged plea suggests the debates about African diasporan identity occurring in Minnesota, which, according to the 2000 Census has the most diverse Black population in the nation: “If you want to build bridges, then look at me as African. When you look at me, you see the spirit of Africa. Look at me as an African; I am not here by choice. Politically, I’m African American; but in my soul and spirit, I’m African.”¹

After her statement, there was an uncomfortable silence across the diverse audience comprised mostly of African immigrants, and White and Black Americans. Before her declaration, the three-hundred-person audience of community activists, foundation staff, and public servants was having a polite discussion. The session moderator was the director of a Washington, D.C. based African immigrant advocacy organization who was also a Zimbabwean immigrant. The theme of his speech was the need for various African immigrant groups to “build bridges” with African American civil rights groups, as both African immigrants and African Americans are affected by racial discrimination. After the stunned silence, a heated exchange ensued prompted by a question from an African American grant maker about how foundations should address factionalism in the Twin Cities’ African immigrant community. An Ethiopian immigrant and locally well-known community activist argued for recognizing the various factions and funding nonprofit organizations to support them: “You can’t expect people to suddenly come to America and forget!” The African American foundation grant maker argued that factions could not be accepted: “In America, we should require that you serve everyone—regardless of clan or tribe—we should apply the same standard.”

The Twin Cities have recently become a crossroads in the global flow of people, ideas, symbols, and capital that increased immigration to the United States has produced. Attracted largely by the metropolitan region’s strong economy, the region has the largest Somali, Hmong, and urban Native American populations in the United States. It also has growing numbers of Chicano, Latino, and Russian immigrants as well as a sizable Tibetan community.² The region’s profound demographic changes have even caught the attention of the national media. Within the past few years, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have all had prominent front-page articles on these profound demographic changes.

The Stockholm of America, this city of lutefisk and liberals has long boasted a tradition of generous social programs and enlightened views on American race relations. But for all the proudly progressive attitudes, only a tiny percentage of blacks actually lived in Minnesota, a place where a mixed marriage once meant the union of a Swede and a Norwegian.

That monochromatic fabric has been changing swiftly. Migration of Blacks, especially those in poverty, has been stronger in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area than in any other urban center in the North. And other groups, especially Hmong, Somalis and Ethiopians, most of them refugees brought to Minnesota by religious groups, have become a growing part of the city’s ethnic mix.

The demographic changes in the land of Lake Wobegone³ are a striking illustration of the ethnic and racial shift that is remaking the nation. And the new mix, particularly the growth among poor blacks from Chicago, is testing the mettle of Minnesota liberalism and changing the texture of the political debate, as civic leaders grapple with issues of race, class, and crime that most other big American cities were forced to confront long ago.⁴

Leaving aside the article’s implied equation of increased racial diversity with crime and a more general sense of social chaos and danger, this excerpt provides a good overall sense of the issues of race, poverty, and diversity, which are very much at the forefront of Twin Cities public discourse and politics.⁵ Concurrent with the increasing settlement of African-born and African American peoples in the Twin Cities, there have been increasing racial disparities on a range of socioeconomic indicators. Despite the relative economic vitality of the region, until the post-September 11 economic downturn, the Twin Cities had been suffering from a critical shortage of skilled labor. Unemployment rates were below the national average—about 2 percent—but many newcomers did not have the skills necessary to fill the plentiful open positions that paid competitive livable wages. Although there was a low overall unemployment rate, the unemployment rate was much higher for people of color.⁶ According to recent census data, four out of every ten African Americans in urban Minnesota live in poverty. This is the highest rate among the nation’s twenty-five largest cities. As a result of these and other socioeconomic factors, including segregation, there is an increasing concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities that is especially affecting communities of color (powell 1999:1; Harrison and Weinberg 1992).⁷

Local social service agencies and the business community, including the many multinational corporations that have Twin Cities headquarters (e.g., 3M and General Mills), have attempted to adjust to the profoundly increased cultural diversity of their customers and workers through the promotion of cultural sensitivity training, specialized employee recruitment efforts, and support of job training and other community development initiatives sponsored by their corporate philanthropy programs. This relatively well-off community is now grappling with perceived convergences of race, class, and poverty that other cities began to confront years ago. Counterbalancing this intensifying concentration of poverty is Minnesota’s vibrant nonprofit and philanthropic sector. The state is generally recognized as having one of the highest levels of philanthropy; innovative, nonprofit activism; and civic participation in the United States.⁸

The Twin Cities, and by extension many of its most diverse neighborhoods, are fast becoming translocalities in Appadurai’s (1996:192) sense of the term. The region, while certainly not on the scale of a New York City or London, is emerging as a world city at the nexus of a global flow of people, ideas, and resources. Everyday social life is at once local and global.

This study examines how a neighborhood-based nonprofit attempts to create a sense of locality in a place where residents may have community affiliations that crosscut the globe.⁹ In this book, my forum for exploring how Africans and Americans are addressing the cultural implications of these changing demographics is the Cultural Wellness Center (CWC). The CWC is a community-based, Minneapolis nonprofit that is deliberately attempting to create a shared sense of community across the diverse new and native-born ethnic groups that now inhabit the Twin Cities metropolitan region.

Exploration of Minnesota’s active construction of new African identities is my most recent leg is an almost twenty-year journey as a practitioner-scholar in the nonprofit sector. During this time, mostly in Nigeria and several North American cities, I have had vexing encounters that blur the lines between what would be considered African and American, or European. In many ways this work is a meditation on the multiple intellectual and personal epiphanies I had along the way. It chronicles the experiences of Twin Cities residents who shared with me their transformative insights as they struggled to adjust to American society on their own cultural terms. It represents a new phase of my understanding of the impact of the global flow of culture through African peoples.¹⁰ It is next to impossible to understand contemporary Africa outside of this flow, and the influences manifest themselves in ways that anthropologists are just beginning to acknowledge and understand. Not only are African peoples mixing the constituent parts of cultures, such as American music, dance, and aesthetics and other influences, to create new practices and identities; this creativity also occurs at a metacultural level. The very theories and models of identity such as culture, race, and ethnicity employed by anthropologists and other social scientists are often also being studied and deliberately reconstructed by everyday African people in this culture-building enterprise.

One of my first experiences of the impact of global cultural dynamics on Africa was as an undergraduate student in African studies at Georgetown University in the early 1980s. I did my first anthropological study from 1982 to 1983 as an exchange student at Ọbáfémi Awólọ́wọ́ University in Ilé Ifẹ̀, Nigeria.¹¹ The study concerned the Aladura Church, a religious revitalization movement that began in Nigeria (see Peel 1968). My most striking experience doing this research was learning that the Aladura Movement had been transplanted to the United States by Yorùbá immigrants. Indeed, Washington, D.C. had, at the time, become an important center for the Aladura Movement, drawing together African American, Caribbean, Nigerian, and other West African adherents. I completed my fieldwork for my senior thesis in African studies on the Aladura Movement not in Nigeria but in Washington, D.C. at an Aladura church founded by a Yorùbá man and his Gullah wife from South Carolina.

My experience in Nigeria, as well as early career experiences in community development efforts back in the United States, led to an interest in the ways in which academic anthropology could be applied to nonprofit sector issues and to the ethnographic research opportunities presented by the community development field. My next African study that underscored the importance of global cultural forces to African societies was ethnoaesthetic research on contemporary Yorùbá architecture in Ilé-Ifẹ̀. In my anthropology and urban planning master’s theses I presented an alternative conceptual model and research method for understanding how contemporary sociocultural, class, and identity issues were reflected in Yorùbá housing design. An important lesson in how transnational cultural flows influence local cultural production was the evolution of the “Brazilian” house, introduced to Nigeria by repatriated Brazilian slaves in the nineteenth century, as the prototype of the “modern” Yorùbá house (Vlach 1984, 1986). This Nigerian project further sensitized me to the limitations of conventional categories such as “traditional” and “modern,” as well as notions such as “ethnicity,” “history,” and even “culture” itself, for capturing the nuances of indigenous cultural dynamics.

My exploration of indigenous models for conceptualizing sociocultural complexity was enhanced by the emerging critical anthropology literature (Said 1978; Fabian 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Marcus and Fisher 1999). In particular, Said’s notion of orientalism (1978); Cohn’s studies of the role of the British census on the construction of South Asian identities (1987a); Fabian’s analysis of the impact of conventional anthropology (1983); comparative studies of historicity; and various analyses of the limits of essentially Western models of nation, ethnicity, and culture (see Barth 1984 and 1989; Depres 1984; Worsley 1984; Harvey 1989; Fardon 1987; Moore 1987; Handler 1988; Appadurai 1990) were instrumental in my still evolving eclectic blend of conventional and critical perspectives in both academic and applied anthropology.

During this period, I became particularly interested in the Nupe of central Nigeria, who were key intermediaries in trans-Saharan trade with the medieval and late nineteenth-century West African forest kingdoms and who built an expansive empire lasting from about the sixteenth century until the British conquest. Additionally since Nadel’s (1942) classic work, there had been little anthropological attention paid to Nupe history and culture. It seemed to me that the study of indigenous Nupe models for organizing and managing cultural diversity would be a base from which to initiate an ongoing original contribution to the field. I decided to do an ethnohistorical study of Nupe identity formation focused on the medieval through early colonial period. In preparation for fieldwork I spent almost a year working with a Nupe immigrant living in Philadelphia who tutored me in the language, using a Nupe grammar guide and dictionary devised by an early twentieth-century British missionary (Banfield 1969). I defined my research problem as an effort to reconstruct indigenous models for the organization of cultural diversity and their transformation through the contemporary period. After completing my Ilé-Ifẹ̀ fieldwork for my master’s theses, I started preliminary fieldwork for this project and was based at the University of Ìllọrin in the summer and fall of 1988 for several months. During this period, I collected and reviewed primary historical records archived in Kaduna and conducted exploratory ethnohistorical interviews in several Nupe villages and towns. This fieldwork was a watershed in my understanding of ethnohistory and identity formation.

Alhaji Aliyu Idress, a scholar of Nupe history then at the University of Ìllọrin and a member of the Nupe royal family, was my guide and interpreter during this visit. Among the several Nupe towns, villages, and cities we visited was Patigi, which prior to the British conquest was an important, cosmopolitan trading center. In Patigi, I interviewed a group of chiefs about the process of a ze Nupe, that is, becoming Nupe. I was particularly interested in following up a notion raised in Nadel’s ethnography that there were “hyphenated” Nupe—people who had emigrated to the Nupe empire from other mostly western Africa polities and were described as Fulani-Nupe, Yorùbá-Nupe, Hausa-Nupe, and so on.

After an astonished and extended commentary on my physical appearance—the shadings of my skin color (which was described as “very black like Hausas”); my facial features, particularly my nose (which was described as “Fulani”); whether my original people were actually “real Nupe” or actually Yorùbá or Fulani; and promising me that “if I found out that my ancestors were Nupe I could return”—one chief explained the a ze Nupe process to me this way:

NUPE CHIEF	Daughter, let me help you understand. You know in America, they call you “Negro.”
JCC	Yes, that is an old term, but that is a term that some people still use.
NUPE CHIEF	Now, Daughter, why do you think they call you Negro?

[Uncomfortable silence.]

NUPE CHIEF

Well let me tell you. Now you think that you are American. They think you are something else and the other people—the Europeans—are really American. That’s how it is with us. Those people that come from outside, they can become Nupe—speak the language and everything—but they are not real Nupe!! Just like you are not a real American!!

I was too shocked by the chief’s unexpectedly insightful analysis of contemporary North American identity politics to present the various possible standard counterpoints to such arguments: America—except for native peoples—was a country of immigrants, so I was as American as anyone else, and so forth. However, for a relatively new initiate to ethnography, this encounter offered several critical and practical lessons that fundamentally influence this study’s orientation toward African diasporan identity formation.

Indigenous notions of identity are not easily disaggregated from the influence of contemporary sociopolitical issues, derived from both local and translocal sources. Instead of reconstructing the historical facts that contributed to the development of the a ze Nupe process, I was actually studying a component of Nupe historicity—the way in which Nupe people conceptualize and remember history based on the convergence of historical events, cultural, and sociopolitical factors. It was difficult to extract an indigenous Nupe model for conceptualizing diversity from the chief’s apparent exposure. I learned later that this exposure to North American notions of identity was largely gained from foreign newspapers, television, and reports of local people who had traveled and lived abroad. Nupe models developed within a transnational cultural flow.

It also became clear, through many incidents similar to the above encounter, that I—and people’s preconceptions and understanding of my own identity as a “Black” person or a person of some sort of African descent—was an unavoidable part of the research context. Whether the notions of the historical connections between Africa and African Americans were considered real, imagined, or invented, the issue was one of active debate whenever I entered a conversation, despite my earnest efforts to keep the group interview focused on “Nupe issues of identity.” Nupe perspectives on my identity and how it influenced the research context were also ethnographic facts that had to be addressed. If I approached this task self-consciously and explicitly (the move to reflexivity and critical analysis of native anthropology were just beginning in the field), the typical debates about my own identity in African diasporan research contexts could add important dimensions to the ethnographic data. On the other hand, if I hid this dimension through the various stylistic artifices possible in ethnographic writing (for example, assumption of the socially neutral, omniscient ethnographer role), I would be contorting the ethnographic data to screen out personally discomforting aspects of the contemporary sociopolitical environment and my perceived role in it.

Yet another experience during this same fieldwork period, this time in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, underscored the importance of transnational cultural flows through the African diaspora in shaping contemporary African identity. I had my hair braided in Ilé-Ifẹ̀ before traveling to my Ìllọrin base for ethnographic site visits to several Nupe villages and towns. The style that I had was not one with which the Ife-Yorùbá hair braider was familiar. It was a style popular among professional African American women in Philadelphia. It involved braiding the hair into cornrows off the face and arranging the resulting cascade of hair that fell to the back of the head into what was known in Philadelphia as a “French twist.” A friend from Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and I talked the braider through adaptations of a classic Yorùbá style to get this Philadelphia-derived, French-twisted design. Well, when I returned from Ìllọrin to Ilé-Ifẹ̀ en route to Lagos for my return to Philadelphia, I was surprised to learn that the painted barbershop sign outside the beautician’s parlor where I had had my hair braided now included the style that the braider created, but it was called the “Sade”—a common Yorùbá female name. When questioning the braider, who was also the shop’s proprietor, about it, she said that several people had subsequently asked her for the style, so she had it added to the barbershop board. She also said that it reminded her of the hairstyle of a London-based rhythm and blues and jazz singer, who is still popular both in the United States and Europe, named “Sade.” The singer also, incidentally, has a Yorùbá father and an English mother. When I returned to Philadelphia, I noticed that many of the braiders that I and my African American friends used were either relatively recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, or native-born African Americans who had adapted some styles imported from Africa. After talking to many of these women, I discovered that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in several cities in the United States, with Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago most prominent among them, mostly African American braiders who were also licensed beauticians, concerned about allegedly unfair and increasing competition from home-based braiders, were leading efforts to create curricula, training programs, and standards for licensing braiders through cosmetology review boards. Many of these home-based braiders, who were not licensed but were making up to $300 per person for the more elaborate styles, were African immigrant and largely low-income African American women working in the informal economy. To more fully explore this issue, through an internship and later consultancy at the Smithsonian Institution’s Program in African American Culture (National Museum of American History and Culture), I conducted an ethnographic study of the aesthetics of the African braiding industry in Washington, D.C., particularly as it related to contemporary African diasporan women’s identity formation. This study not only emphasized the transnational exchange of symbols and images through the contemporary African diaspora but also hinted at what appeared to be the increasing commodification of these images in the contemporary global economy.

Thus, whether I was studying the Aladura religious movement, Nupe historicity, Yorùbá ethnoaesthetics and architecture, or identity politics and economics of African diasporan hairdressing, it became clear that a transnational approach is increasingly necessary to fully understand contemporary African and American cultural experience. This book builds on recent advances in culture theory, African diasporan studies as well as approaches from African diasporan ethnoaesthetics, ethnohistory, literary criticism, and religion (see Soyinka 1976, 1984; Gates 1984, 1988; Apter 1991, 1992; Mintz and Price 1992; Gilroy 1993; Murphy 1994; Chambers 1996). It represents the findings of a twenty-eight-month ethnographic study of the CWC’s work to mobilize the region’s small but relatively diverse and growing African American, African immigrant, and Afro-Caribbean immigrant residents to promote a notion of a shared “African” culture.¹²

With this ethnographic examination of African diasporan cultural dynamics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, my academic and professional study of African identity formation has come full circle, expanding from its initial focus on such processes in West Africa to include a more global perspective, including the African diaspora as manifested in the United States. The CWC story about creating and promoting a transnational sense of African identity provides ethnographic insights into how people are creating notions of culture, identity, and place in the context of the global cultural interchanges that characterize contemporary urban America.

The research applies the longstanding anthropological study of indigenous African ethnicity to redress the relative neglect by the field, and immigration studies in general, of identity formation processes in North America’s African diaspora. It also extends widely influential ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies in Africanist anthropology (e.g., Kopytoff 1981, 1988; Peel 1983; Comaroff 1985; Barnes 1986; M. Jackson 1986, 1989; Fardon 1988) to the study of the African diaspora in the United States. It attempts to connect these partially disconnected streams of African and African diasporan studies to provide an expanded theoretical pool for interpreting the polyvalent cultural flows that have historically informed and continue to connect Africa and the Americas—from Nigeria’s nineteenth-century “Brazilian” architecture to variations on the African-derived religions in today’s New York City (Barnes 1997). It sees the historical and contemporary cultural interchanges of the African diaspora—and diasporas in general—as providing important case studies that contribute to anthropology’s current effort to understand global cultural formations. In addition to contributing to the movement toward research-driven ethnography in applied settings (Sanday 1976, 1998b; Ahmed and Shore 1995; Reed 1997), the study particularly informs the field’s just emerging interest in the ethnography of the nonprofit sector, particularly the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Escobar 1991, 1995; Ferguson 1994; Weisgrau 1997; W. F. Fisher 1997).

I attempt to apply and combine modified versions of what some scholars consider outmoded constructs—for example, “culture,” “thick ethnographic description,” and social network perspectives—with contemporary processual and reflexive approaches that look at the transnational flow of images and symbols, the construction of identity, and discourses on culture, race, gender, and hegemony, and with a self-consciousness of my sociopolitical role and impact as a native ethnographer.

As fieldwork progressed, it became evident that the intimate issues of health and wellness at the core of the CWC’s community-building agenda focus on the body as a vehicle and agent for cultural recall and revitalization. A more sensual approach to ethnography than is typical in ethnography of immigrant experiences and ethnicity was required. In constructing African identity, CWC was very much attempting to create a different way of conceptualizing, sensing, and reconnecting what they call the “mind/body/spirit divide.” The spoken word was critical for expressing and knowing the African reality the CWC was attempting to create. However, a methodology that privileges the written or spoken word over other ways of knowing would misconstrue a critical dimension of the CWC’s mission. Therefore, an explicit effort is made to accommodate multiple modes of expression—the sounds, smells, and rhythms that comprise the aesthetics of the CWC’s identity formation process.

Drawing on current approaches in sensorial anthropology and embodiment theory (see Howes 1991; M. Jackson 1983, 1989; Stoller 1989, 1987, 1996), the study is sensitive to the various ways the CWC’s “African” leadership combines dialogical, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and oral modes of sensing, knowing and expressing reality—their lived, embodied experience of Africanness.¹³ I attempt to present what the CWC’s “African” leadership calls the “African way of seeing and knowing the world.” In an effort to convey the intimate, lived, embodied experience of CWC participants I cite at length class and support group conversations as well as staff meetings, without any specific participant attribution. To fully comprehend and convey the insider’s point of view on cultural wellness and identity formation required more than ethnographic interviewing and detached participation in meetings. I sometimes engaged in a rather rigorous—and physically challenging—form of intensive participant observation involving classes, staff and volunteer planning sessions, community meetings, and special events. This gave me multiple points of view on experiences of participants as well as a sense of the physical sensations they felt as something the CWC leadership considered to be a core component in the transformative identity formation process.

Special attention is given to the way participants felt about the CWC’s spatial environment—its smell, design, decor, and ambiance—all of which figured prominently in interviews and comments. Photographs (see Appendix B), most of which were taken by a CWC participant and part-time teacher who also happened to be a professional photographer, aid this effort to depict the comprehensive, affective sense of Africanness that many participants felt was conveyed by the CWC’s space.

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.