Conference studies global impact of black Diaspora

Serghino René

More often than not, the widely used term “African American” is defined to include only those who are the descendants of former slaves here in America. But that definition only serves to limit the full range and complexity of the phrase.

Those nuances were the subject of last weekend’s Fourth International Conference by Boston University’s African American Studies Program. Entitled “Community Building and Identity Formation in the African Diaspora,” the scholarly conference examined the African American experience from a global perspective.

“I hope people got a sense of how global the African impact has been and the complexity of their identity formation,” said Ronald Richardson, director of the African American Studies Program at Boston University. “Africans have been all over the world and their experiences are quite different.”

Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, delivered the keynote address and further defined the concept of the black Diaspora globally.

The term “Diaspora” is often associated with the dispersion of an originally homogeneous entity. Patterson talked about the Diaspora as a series of migrating waves, explaining that West Indians, African Americans and Latin American blacks belonged to the first wave Diaspora that defined their homeland as Africa.

West Indians in Central and North America, as well as European and black Latinos, represent a second wave Diaspora space that defined their homeland as Latin America and the Caribbean islands. For them, the African homeland is twice removed. Black immigrants in the United States from Central America occupy a third wave Diaspora and identify their central home as the Caribbean.

Although they were dispersed through various regions of the globe, they shared a common bond: slavery.

Brazil was the destination of the largest number of Africans during slave-trading days and, as a result, still has the largest Diaspora of African descent outside of Africa, followed by the United States. The Caribbean and the Americas are known as the Atlantic Diaspora, which Richardson says has received probably the most attention from historians and scholars.

According to Patterson’s research, about 93.9 million people, making up 57.2 percent of the Diaspora population, live in South America. About 36.6 million, or 22.3 percent, live in North America, and about 2.3 million, or 1.4 percent, live in Central America. The Diaspora further includes 29.4 million, roughly 18 percent, living in the Caribbean and a scant 1.9 million, 1.2 percent, in Europe.

Boston University history professor Marilyn Halter and Violet Johnson, chair of the history department at Agnes Scott College, jointly discussed the culture and adaptation patterns of West Africans in the United States.

Johnson explained that in West African society, America is equated with success. Cape Verdeans, for example, immigrated to southern New England to work in the cranberry bogs, whaling ships and textile mills.

“These Afro-Portuguese settlers are particularly noteworthy as they represent the first voluntary mass migration from Africa to the United States in American history,” said Halter. “They are still making the trans-Atlantic journey, but especially over the last three decades, they have been accompanied by a broad range of newcomers from the other major West African countries of Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal.”

They further discussed some of the core values of West African culture and the reasons for migration, and explored their approach to achieving success in the United States.

“Education as the most effective avenue for success is a conviction embraced by the adult immigrant generation and transmitted to the young immigrants, which is rooted in their pre-migration psyches,” said Johnson. “Education, which African nations specify as Western education, has been valued and has proved to be a formidable [means] for upward mobility.”

Halter and Johnson also explained the confusion and miscommunication that immigrant West Africans, as well as other members of the Diaspora, experience when they merge with African American culture. They come to realize that their outlooks and values are different, since they may not identify with African Americans who base their identity from the over 400 years of slavery and the civil rights movement.

That’s one of the major reasons why Richardson says it’s important for members of the African Diaspora to understand and be aware of each other’s cultural circumstances in a global context. Such knowledge and communication, he says, will only unify and strengthen them as a people.

“I feel the more we question these bloc identities, the freer we can become as individuals to express ourselves,” said Richardson. “We all want to be proud of our background, but we don’t want our background to be a block in our development as human beings. It should be a basis, a foundation from which we move, not a ceiling.”

The papers presented in the panels will be collected and edited, Richardson said, with Cambridge University Press already expressing interest in publishing the works.

“We have to bring an understanding of what the African American experience has been beyond just entertainment,” said Richardson. “The world just sees African Americans in terms of Hollywood and hip-hop. However, there is much more than that.”