When I was asked to share some of my reflections on the evolution of African Diaspora studies in the United States, I recalled that a colleague and I mused about the appearance of recent advertisements in scholarly journals for African Diaspora specialists. We also observed that several colleges and universities have courses with African Diaspora in the title. Indeed, Diaspora as a description of the dispersion and settlement of Africans abroad is fairly common in academic parlance today and increasingly so in popular discussions; however, such has not always been the case.

The recent debates among scholars on hegemony and race in African Studies are very exciting. Realities that African-American intellectuals know quite well—that there was a Black tradition of scholarship on Africa in the Americas long before 1948 and that peoples of African descent have been marginalized within the African Studies establishment—are finally getting a much needed airing. Although some of the opinions, such as those expressed by Phillip Curtin in the Chronicle are difficult to swallow and no doubt the cause of great unease, many of us are not surprised and are in fact elated. Silences on issues of racism are never golden, only a resolve to expose and fight them are.

What is the meaning of the term “African Diaspora” and what is its extent? What is its future? Although the term has long been used for the scattered daughters and sons of Africa in the Americas, little attention has been devoted to delimiting its boundaries. From the fifteenth century onward, over ten million forced migrants left the African continent to people both of the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean. Their culture was never static; it involved syncretistic reformation, subsumption/transmogrification and reintegration/reassertion.

Let me begin by defining two terms that I use in the title. By “mirror images” I mean people who look alike based on certain physical characteristics they have in common. These characteristics may not be exactly the same, but they are close enough that people are both self-identified and other-identified as looking the “same.”

By “shared standpoints” I mean that people who have these are commonly enough situated in a set of circumstances or conditions due to shared factors such as ‘race,’ class, ethnicity, religion, sex etc. that they have a common perspective vis-á-vis a number of issues. People can have a shared standpoint on the basis of any one of these factors in common, or, a combination of them.

While on its homeward passage in 1813, the whaling ship William Penn was intercepted off the island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic by a British frigate, boarded, and informed of the existence of war; and that the American seamen were prisoners of H.M.S. Acorn. Within a half hour, the Acorn and its prize (now manned by English sailors) were underway, heading off southeast for the Cape of Good Hope. After a passage of forty days they anchored in Table Bay.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, black music has been prominent in the international arena—from ragtime to rumba and jazz, right up to today’s black and white fusions. Dance music and drama originally from Africa were adapted to the New World, creating an enormous impact there and feeding back into the mainstream of music in Africa itself. This double transformation, brought about by leaving and returning home, has created a truly international music-style in Africa, and yet one that is doubly African.

In a recent article by Veit Erlmann in the South African journal of musicology (SAMUS vol. 14, 1995) entitled “Africa Civilized, Africa Uncivilized,” Erlmann draws upon the reception history of the South African Zulu Choir’s visit to London in 1892 and the Ladysmith Black Mambazo presence in Paul Simon’s Graceland project to highlight the epithet “Africa civilized, Africa uncivilized.” Though the term was used by the turn of the century British press to publicize the event, the slogan carries far greater impact upon the locus of the identity of urban black people in South Africa for more than a century.

At the close of the twentieth century, we are witnessing across the globe competing, frequently cataclysmic discourses about identity. These discourses are literally erupting into activities that reshape the meaning of “national culture.” Simultaneously, many of these cultural confrontations are giving visibility and voice to transnational cultural communities. Within this world-wide context, U.S. cultural and educational institutions are at the national frontline of a related volatile, but potentially promising, debate frequently referred to as “cultural wars.” Museums in particular have become a flash point on the cultural landscape of what cultural conservatives Arthur A. Schlesinger and Patrick J. Buchanan accurately, although shrilly, formulate as “a struggle to redefine the national identity.”

The fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England in October 1945 with a great roster of delegates who would play, and had played, critical roles in the advancement of Black freedom: W.E.B. DuBois, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, and Jomo Kenyatta, to name a few. It was an historic gathering held at a point in history when the defeat of fascism in Europe and the impending demise of colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean were great causes for optimism among progressive people the world over. The manifesto issued by the Congress delegates exposed the atrocities of colonialism, tapped into the universal language of anti-fascism, and thereby hastened the process of decolonization.

In the 1950’s a Black sailor from the United States came to Capetown and gave someone there a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son. That single copy traveled around the whole country. Each person would keep it a week or two, read and reread it, and then pass it on. Native Son convinced me that as an African writer I did not have to sound like a carbon copy English boy if I wrote in English.

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.

It was during my early years in high school (in Kenya), that I was first exposed to the idea that far away in the Americas lived people who were black. I was greatly fascinated by this idea. Until then, history was just another mundane class that focused on Europeans colonizing Africa and large parts of the rest of the world. Because the syllabus did not include the stories of the real makers of African History—the Africans themselves—as a young African student I found the learning experience to be fairly alienating. Part of the materials covered in class included David Livingstone’s three missionary journeys. No effort was made to bring to the student’s awareness that the caravans of the so-called “slaves” that Livingstone stumbled on in the interior of Africa were Africans like ourselves.

I was raised in Northern New Mexico, a white girl in a predominantly Hispanic population. The public education I received in this small Southwestern town was somewhat unusual, as it reflected the cultural diversity within at least our own community. So although I was subjected to the traditional Western canon, and plodded through Shakespeare, the American Revolution, and the diagramming of English sentences, the community made sure that I learned some Spanish and some aspects of Mexican culture as well. In elementary school I made skeletons from colored construction paper and paste to commemorate the Mexican Dia de los Muertes, or Day of the Dead.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, many whites, including myself, embraced antiapartheid work, partly because we were outraged at the horror of South Africa but also because it gave us a way to fight racism and do antiracism work here in the United States. I had always seen and disapproved of racism and from a very young age felt a need to fight against it. The anti-apartheid struggle gave me a solid way to do that. In the mid 70’s when I was in college, the campus that I was on was so segregated and the institutional policies so paternalistic and racist that there were very few forums for blacks and whites to work together. The first fully-fledge antiapartheid group at my university, which I joined on its inception, was established by an African-American who was a visiting artist on campus.