As I currently travel through Asia doing research on African diasporas, I have become more convinced than ever that we need to de-Atlanticize the histories of African diasporas. For the field to grow it is critical that the Atlantic model of African diaspora studies be provincialized rather than universalized as is the tendency among scholars in the U.S. and Anglophone academies for whom the world beyond can only be simulated copies of their own and for those elsewhere anxious to signal their cosmopolitan familiarity with the intellectual products of the world's largest academic system.
The field of African diaspora studies has grown rapidly in recent years. Certainly the term ‘African diaspora' was not used by the great Pan-Africanists from W.E.B. Dubois to Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor to Aime Cesaire, George Padmore to Frantz Fanon. The rise of African diaspora studies can be attributed to several developments within and outside the academy. The intellectual dynamics include the rise of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies, which collectively recast the questions of culture, identity, and transnationalism in African studies previously dominated by structuralist perspectives inspired by Marxist and dependency paradigms overlaid on age-old Eurocentric notions of eternal African marginality, the fiction that the continent was irredeemably irrelevant and splendidly isolated from the rest of the world.
The diaspora paradigm reconnects Africa to its peoples dispersed around the world and globalizes Africa, repositions the continent in world history. Accompanying these intellectual imperatives are institutional dynamics, the establishment of centers, institutes, or programs of diaspora studies, the emergence of journals, book series, and research funding on the subject. As with any field of scholarship, once you build the institutional architecture research and publications tend follow, discourses and debates are manufactured, careers made and unmade.
The rapidly expanding intellectual and institutional dynamics promoting diaspora studies have been facilitated and reinforced by ideological imperatives, the investment by states and various publics in diaspora communities, the popular discourses by and on diaspora populations, perspectives, problems, and possibilities. The discovery by African states and development agencies of the new African diasporas as a developmental asset, as the continent's major donor, is complimented by a growing consciousness on the part of the diasporas themselves and their capacity to act as powerful transnational forces.
Needless to say, the field is fraught with conceptual challenges. Two will suffice. They are rooted in the very words ‘African diaspora'. Let's begin with the second word. How do we define ‘diaspora' in terms of process, spatiality and periodization? Diasporas emerge out of processes involving movement from a ‘here' of the homeland, real or imagined, to a ‘there' of a hostland, loved or hated, but the relationship between dispersal and diasporization is complicated for dispersed people can ‘return' or ‘disappear' through assimilation. In short, diasporas are born, bred, and can die. Movements can be short, circulatory, and permanent, generational and transgenerational in their longevity; surely not every movement out of one's community, country, or continent qualifies to be called diasporic.
Equally vexing is the question of the spatial scale of diaspora formations, the boundaries which define the process of diasporization--are they to be deemed primarily in trans-ethnic, transnational, or transcontinental terms? Today, one can of course talk simultaneously of a Luo, Kenyan, and African diaspora in the United States, as many people among the Luo, in Kenya, and across the continent call President Obama. One can also talk of the Luo and Kenyan diaspora in South Africa, but it would be an oxymoron to call the same people an African diaspora in South Africa in so far as both Kenya and South Africa are African countries.
Since all three spatio-social referents--ethnic, national, and continental--as embodiments of social identities are historical constructs, it raises the question of periodization and how far back we can push certain diaspora identities. The fact that African states are recent inventions of colonialism that did not exist 150 years ago except for the notable cases of Egypt, Morocco, and Ethiopa might explain why the diasporas that emerged out of earlier movements particularly in the Atlantic world and who did not by and large come from these countries are simply called 'African'. Notions of 'Asian' or 'European' diasporas are not as palpable since they are often trumped by national identities--the Irish diaspora, the Italian diaspora, the Indian diaspora, the Chinese diaspora. For Africa, this is of course becoming increasingly true for the 'new' diasporas whose national identities compete with or subsume their continental identies.
The second conceptual challenge concerns the meaning of the first part of the pairing in the term 'African diaspora'. What is ‘Africa' and who are ‘Africans' that constitute, when dispersed and reconstituted, ‘African diasporas'? As we all know, the idea of ‘Africa' is an exceedingly complicated one with multiple genealogies and meanings: Africa as biology, as space, as memory, and as representation, that is, African identities, peoples, and cultures are often and differentially mapped in racial, geographical, historical, or ideological terms. Ironically, all the seven sources of the term 'Africa' originally referred to the locations in the northern part of the continent, but now in many circles the term has become almost synonymous with sub-Saharan Africa.
It can reasonably be argued that ‘Africa' is a material and imagined place, a historical geography, the constellation of the places and peoples embedded in its cartographic and conceptual bosom. It is an invention as much as ‘Asia' or ‘Europe' or the ‘West' and all such civilizational spaces, but it has a physical, political, psychic and paradigmatic reality for the peoples who live within or who are from its cartographic and cultural boundaries, themselves subject to shifts. 'Africa', I would submit, is more 'African' today than it has ever been because it is increasingly a construct produced and consumed across the continent itself from sports to television to politics, from the All-Africa Games to Big Brother Africa to the African Union.
This implies that our conception of ‘African diasporas' crucially depends on how we define these very terms and these definitions in turn have contexts that frame them. This is merely to suggest the obvious point that like most fields of intellectual inquiry African diaspora studies exhibits divergent historical geographies in which the historical experiences and scholarly traditions of particular countries dominate in specific regions. Obviously not all regions and traditions have equal standing in the hierarchical international division of intellectual labor. In other words, hegemonic ideas ride on the hegemony of power.
In African diaspora studies there is no question that the Atlantic model dominates. It focuses on movements from western Africa to the Americas through the forced migrations of the Atlantic slave trade and it is preoccupied with the construction of ‘black' identities. The hegemony or universalizing ambitions of the Atlantic model are partly based on the sheer size of Africa's diasporas in the Americas, which currently number more than 160 million people (more than 100 million in South America, 40 million in North American, and 22 million in the Caribbean).
But the Atlantic model is problematic when applied to other world regions and periods. It is premised on a conception of ‘Africa' as ‘sub-Saharan Africa', a racialized, some would even say racist construction of ‘Africa' that has haunted African studies in Euroamerica over the last century which many African scholars have sought to deconstruct. This reflects the dominance in the Euroamerican academy of the Atlantic and of race in the fields of African studies in general and African diaspora studies in particular. Quite predictably, ‘black' is the paradigmatic trope in Atlantic diaspora studies, the pivot around which discourses of ‘African' diaspora identities, subjectivities, transnationalisms, or engagements are framed and debated.
The conflation of African diaspora formations with the histories and geographies of Atlantic slavery disregards the histories of other African diasporas in the Americas themselves both during the period of the European slave trade and after. To begin with, it fails to problematize the identity of the very Iberians--the Spanish and Portuguese--who began the conquest of the Americas. Among them were peoples of African descent who had been resident in Iberia for centuries. On a recent trip to Spain I heard some diaspora scholars insist that Spanish identity only fully dis-Africanized itself following the country's accession into the European project. The joke that Africa began at the Pyrenees articulated Spain and Portugal's mixed historical heritage from the Moors, some say Muslim, others Arab even though the people were largely from northwestern Africa who conquered and ruled large parts of the peninsula between 711 and 1492, making them in the view of a Moroccan historian African kingdoms in Europe. Recent work on the migrations of the Moriscos and even Cape Verdians to the Americas is pertinent in this regard.
Fixated on the forced migrations of enslaved people from western Africa, the Atlantic model easily yields to a Hegelian conception of Africa in which Africa entails sub-Saharan Africa and African diasporas are exclusively ‘black', a paradigm that leads to a preoccupation with the formation of black racial identities. This model also ignores the formation of ‘new' African diasporas out of voluntary migrations since the abolition of slavery and especially since decolonization. Over the last two decades more African migrants have been arriving, some even claim have arrived, in the United States than during the Atlantic slave trade.
But even for the historic African diasporas of the Americas, the Atlantic model tends to advance an Anglophone American paradigm in which the U.S. experience and modes of racialization and black identity formation are often generalized to the rest of the Americas even though Afro-Latin America, which is more than twice as large as Afro-North America, has its own quite distinctive histories. Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, an influential text in U.S. African diaspora studies (but not in Britain itself where Gilroy is from), which ignores both Africa and Afro-Latin America, exemplifies this unproductive Anglophone analytical conceit.
Most importantly, the Atlantic model is inadequate when applied to the much older and more complicated histories of African interactions with, and diasporas in, Europe and Asia. I am struck by the amount of intellectual energy expended in trying to force the histories of African movements to Europe and Asia, and the formation of African diasporas in these regions into the Atlantic model by seeing their movements primarily in terms of slavery and sub-Saharan Africans. ‘Africa' and ‘Africans' of course include ‘blacks' but are not confined to them, and before the twentieth century some Africans went to Europe and Asia as enslaved people, but not all, perhaps not even the majority, and their identities were not framed by American-style regimes of racialization. Other social inscriptions and ideologies such as religion sometimes played a more salient role.
Systematic studies of African diasporas in Europe and Asia are a recent phenomena. Both are inspired by some of the same forces noted earlier. In the case of Europe, additional impetus has also been provided by the increased African migrations over the last few decades and European anxieties, which have manifested themselves both in the development of multiculturalism as public policy and xenophobic violence. In Europe the definitional challenges are thrown into particularly sharp relief: do we talk of Black or African diasporas, Black Europe or Afro-Europe? Some of the scholarship that is emerging on ‘Black Europe', ‘Black France,' etc, which borrows uncritically from the Atlantic model is clearly problematic. Across Europe there are as many people from so-called sub-Saharan Africa as from North Africa, so the size of the African diaspora depends on whether both groups are counted or not. No wonder the estimates range from 8 million to 22 million!
If one were to periodize the African presence in Europe within historical memory, to use the African Union's definition of African diaspora communities that they should have been formed within ‘historical memory', a rather vague formulation but one that avoids going back to prehistoric times or even the great migrations out of Africa to populate the planet, then four broad periods can be distinguished, what I would call ancient times (before the 15th century), which can be further subdivided, slaving Europe (16th-mid-19th centuries), colonial Europe (mid-19th to mid-20th centuries), and post-colonial Europe (since decolonization).
Unlike the Americas the bulk of African movements to Europe have historically been ‘free'. Clearly there have been variations in the periodization, size, and formation of African diasporas in different parts of Europe. For example, in Southern Europe one could go back to Roman times, in Eastern Europe including Russia to medieval times, and Western Europe to the African conquests of the Iberian Peninsula. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Europe's African diasporas today are descended from or are members of the ‘new' diasporas unlike in the Americas where the historic diasporas predominate. The composition of Europe's ‘overlapping' diasporas is therefore quite different from the Americas.
For example, in France, which hosts the largest African diaspora in Europe, there are at least four groups of diasporas: long-standing communities of African descent, Antillean blacks, Africans from West and Central Africa, and Africans from North Africa. These communities have complex relations with each other and with the French state and the wider society, in which the schisms and solidarities of race, religion, region of origin, not to mention nationality, class, and gender play significant and shifting roles. West Africans, for example may racially identify with the Antilleans, religiously with the North Africans, and subregionally with the Central Africans.
It could be argued that the histories of African diasporas in Asia are perhaps the most complicated of all. This could of course simply reflect my own ignorance as a scholar educated and brought up in Anglophone and Atlantic traditions. The difficulties of studying these diasporas, I would submit, in part reflect the dominance of the Atlantic model itself and Eurocentric scholarship. There are widespread western assumptions that interactions among the world's various regions and peoples were a product of the European-dominated modern era of the last five centuries. It is also often believed that African extra-continental movements were confined to the Americas symbolized by the slave ship. The reality of course was a lot more complex. As anybody who has seriously studied Indian Ocean histories knows, interactions between Africa and Asia long predated the establishment of European global hegemony in the 16th and 17th centuries. Also, African movements involved both free and unfree movements.
Another problem arises out of western racialized constructions of Africa and Africans, Asia and Asians, and Arabia and Arabs. The epistemological implications of the fixations with ‘race' and the colonial constructs of the presumably immutable identities of the peoples of the two continents is now well known thanks to the works of Edward Said and V.Y. Mudimbe and their numerous followers on Orientalism on the invention of Africa, respectively. It is hard, but we must develop the historical imagination to understand that the constructions of racial identities in the Americas or more specifically the United States do not have universal applicability or meaning.
African-Asian interactions after prehistoric times could be divided into five periods: what I would call ancient interactions involving Pharaonic Egypt's interactions with western Asia involving conquests and counter-conquests and ancient Ethiopian connections with the Arabian Peninsula; interactions of the classical era under the Greek and Roman empires; interactions under the Islamic era; interactions under the European imperial era from the 15th and 16th centuries; and contemporary interactions since decolonization. The spatial dimensions of these interactions involved the Mediterranean-Red Sea corridor linking northern African with western Asia, the Red Sea-Indian Ocean corridor linking northeastern Africa with western and southern Asia, and the Indian Ocean corridor linking eastern Africa with Indian Ocean islands and Asia. Today, of course there are the connections facilitated by the ubiquitous modern transport, communication and information technologies and reinforced by Africa's growing economic linkages with Asia.
If we take into account the above spatial and temporal dimensions, the patterns of dispersal were extremely varied and complex. Much of the literature focuses on three patterns of sub-Saharan African migrations over the last 2,000 years to western Asia from Arabia to Iran from the first millennia; to South and East Asia from the second millennia; and to the Indian Ocean islands from the 15th century. These migrations took place under the last three periods mentioned above (Islamic, European, and contemporary). The dispersals were characterized by both free movements, as merchants, proselytizers, entertainers, sailors and soldiers, as well as unfree movements, as slaves under the Arab slave trade in which they were used as domestic servants, concubines, and agricultural laborers, soldiers, sailors, dockworkers, fishermen, and under the European slave trade by the Portuguese, Dutch, and French who took Africans to their colonies in the Indian Ocean and Asia to work on plantations and as soldiers.
In comparison to the Americas, it is incontrovertible that African movements to Asia have a much longer history, the patterns of dispersal were more varied, and the processes of diasporization far more complex. As noted earlier, as a process diasporization begins with dispersal from a homeland and the development of a diaspora consciousness. The latter entails developing collective memories of the homeland, traditions of return or engagement, and transnational networks. Critical in this process is the way the dispersed are treated in terns of the prevailing socioeconomic conditions and regimes of racialization in the hostlands as well as the nature of the interactions they are able to maintain with the homeland directly and indirectly, real and imaginary, substantively or symbolically.
It has been argued that diasporic consciousness among the dispersed Africans in Asia was weaker than in the Atlantic world because of their relatively small size, the slow and long duration of their migrations which facilitated assimilation into host populations. In other words, their dispersals lacked the temporal and geographic concentration of the Americas. Also, the varieties of names by which Africa and the Africans have been known in Asia undermined development of collective identities as 'Africans' or 'black'. They were often known by their specific regions of origin in Africa rather than as Africans--Sudan, Habasha, Zandj, Nuba, Baburu, Takruni, Abid, Mawalid, Kaffir, Habshi, Sidi, and so on.
No less important are the complexities of color and race in Asian societies in which there are many Asians who are as dark as many sub-Saharan Africans and as light as many North Africans. Color therefore is not always a reliable indicator of 'Africanness'. There has also been considerable debate on the role played by the integrative mechanisms and ideologies of Islam in parts of Asia, that even for the enslaved Islam provided better prospects for social assimilation than segregated Christianity in the slave societies of the Americas. Furthermore, there was the apparent absence of systematic violence, legal segregation, racial and ethnic discrimination on the American pattern, and paucity of leadership to develop and articulate diasporic consciousness and interests.
Whatever the case, the Atlantic model is not terribly helpful in deciphering the full dimensions and complexities of African diasporas in Asia. Asia is of course a huge continent, so it is important to distinguish the various locations of African diasporas on which historical sources exist and a significant body of knowledge is growing. The Indian Ocean islands pose a special definitional problem in so far as they a part of Africa and their African populations, from a continental perspective, could be considered part of intra-African diasporas. The islands are also home to Asians and Europeans, so that over the last few centuries they have emerged as the quintessential meeting grounds for Africans, Asians and Europeans. In some sense they bear resemblances with the Caribbean in terms of the dynamics of creolization.
For Asia proper, there are three key zones. First, Africans in the Arabian Peninsula, in which population movements on both sides have gone on for centuries from the various red Sea Empires including those of Ethiopia to the rise of Islam to the Arab slave trade. The African presence in this region is unmistakeable and the African diaspora has had a marked impact on the region's cultures, economies, and polities. Contemporary migrations have been fueled by the astronomical growth of the oil economy. In 2005, Saudi Arabia reportedly had the second largest African-born population in the world after France, estimated at 1.5 million.
There is also a long history of African settlements in the Persian Gulf regions of Southern Iraq and Iran. The Africans came from multiple geographic and social origins and occupations. In Southern Iraq, for example, the African presence which goes back to antiquity became concentrated in Basra from the 7th century when an Ethiopian soldier, Abu Bakra settled in the city. There are several well known scholars of African descent whose works have survived to this day, such as Abu `Uthman' Amr Ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri, known to posterity as al-Jahiz (ca. 776-869), author of the book, The Glory of Blacks Over Whites, translated in the 1980s. Southern Iraq is best known for the Revolt of the Zanj 868-883 dealt a severe blow to slavery and contributed to crisis in the Abbasid caliphate. More recently, it was reported that following his incredible victory Black Iraqis, of whom they are an estimated 2 million, made Obama a model to follow [1].
Finally, there is South Asia, principally Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka. Take India, which I am currently visiting. There is ample evidence of Africans' in the country going back at least to the 13th century. They came as merchants, sailors, soldiers, and slaves. Variously called Habshi (for Abyssinia) and Siddi (meanings vary one says it is derived from Sayyid Arabic for 'master'), they played various important roles in the political, military, and social life of the country's various empires and kingdoms from the Delhi sultanate to Mughal India.
The African Indian presence was quite marked in several parts of the country from the north (Alapur and Jaunpur) to the north-east (Bengal) to the south (Deccan) to the west coast (Janjira, Goa, and Calicut) to the north-west (Cambay) to Gujarat) to the interior (Hyderabad). In fact they became a powerful political force in their own right in the Deccan in the late 15th and early 16th centuries and established several sultanates including Bijapur, Golcanda, and Ahmadnagar. Two of the African kingdoms in India, Janjira established in 1618 by Sidi Ambar Sainak, an emissary of the legendary Habshi military leader Malik Ambar, and Sachin founded by Sidi Mohammad Abdu l-Karim Khan in 1791, survived until the time of India's independence 1947 when they joined the new state. To quote the titles of two books, the positions of Africans in India ranged From Slavery to Royalty (R.R.S. Chauhan), and there were African Elites in India (K.X. Robbins and J. McLeod) who would have been unimaginable in the Americas until recently. In fact, when I met Dr. Chauhan last week at the National Museum in New Delhi where he is Director of Exhibitions and Public Relations he greeted me with the colorful statement: 'There are many Obamas in India.' After a dramatic pause, he explained, 'There were many African rulers in India.'
In global terms, then, there are at least three sets of African diasporas, the trans-Indian Ocean diasporas, trans-Mediterranean diasporas, and trans-Atlantic diasporas. Each of these diasporas has its own histories; they share similarities, differences, and parallels that are exceedingly difficult to analyze. Much of our analytical paradigms and preoccupations, at least in the North Atlantic world, tend to be derived, almost exclusively, from the experiences of the trans-Atlantic diasporas, the most recent, historically, of the African global diasporas.
We need to develop better and more comparative understanding of the histories of Afro-Asia, Afro-Europe, and Afro-America. It cannot be overemphasized that there are subregional differences among these diaspora collectivities; the histories of Afro-Latin America and Afro-North America have not been mere replicas of each other. Such comparative analyses will, almost as a matter of course, help de-center the hegemony of the Atlantic model of diaspora studies and some of its unproductive paradigms such as the preoccupation with slavery and blackness as the formative basis of all African diasporas, which fails to incorporate the so-called new diasporas.
A key question in the history of African diasporas centers on the nature and dynamics of their engagements, linkages, connections, dialogues--pick your term--with Africa. For some these have been intense and for others weak or even non-existent. Engagements are subject of course to the shifting mediations of particular historical moments. The diasporas and Africa have served as signifiers for each other subject to strategic manipulation and subject to the changing constructions of their respective identities, social positionalities, and political economies. The engagements have encompassed movements of people, cultural practices, productive resources, organizations and movements, ideologies and ideas, images and representations.
In general, the new diasporas enjoy stronger linkages with Africa than the older diasporas and among the latter there are differences of magnitude between and among the diasporas in the Americas, Europe, and Asia mediated by resources available to the diasporas, the connections between their respective countries and Africa, and the flows of new African migrations. Each diaspora community has its own commitments and imaginations of Africa. A critical part of building diaspora linkages is knowledge production: as intellectuals we are often as involved in transcribing diaspora identities as in inscribing them. That is why for a more pluralistic and productive global history of African diasporas for the Pan-Africanism and internationalism of the 21st century, we need to conceptualize and construct more complex diasporas. Besides, this may also be historically more accurate.
Lecture presented at the International India Centre, New Delhi, June 8, 2009 and at the University of Mumbai, Mumbai, June 12, 2009.