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African Intellectuals in the Belly of the Beast: Migration, Identity, and the Politics of Exile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2016

F. Njubi Nesbitt
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Extract

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

Type
Part IV: African Migrants in Europe and North America
Information
African Issues , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 70 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002 

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References

Notes

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Educational Attainment of the Foreign-born Population 25 Years and Over by Region of Birth and Gender, 1997, table 13-D; available at http://www.census.org.

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