The Reversal

Chapter 6 The Reversal

To return, rather than simply to re-visit or re-view, that is, to apparently turn back and return ‘fully’, to African, Caribbean or Indian roots in pur- suit of a displaced and dispersed authenticity today hardly seems feasible. The impossible mission that seeks to preserve the singularity of a culture must paradoxically negate its fundamental element: its historical dynamic. Post-colonialism is perhaps the sign of an increasing awareness that it is not feasible to subtract a culture, a history, a language, an identity from the wider, transforming currents of the increasingly metropoli- tan world. It is impossible to ‘go home’ again.1

In the 1990s, the Afrocentric foundations of Black identity were called into question by English-speaking scholars, themselves Black, in the name of a critique of essentialism and a postmodern perspective on identity that rejected appeals to fixity, purity or authenticity in favour of an insistence on the perma- nent construction of identifications. We find a most of the arguments against Afrocentric essentialism in a 1990 text by the scholar bell hooks:2

Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that rein- force and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the “primitive” and promoted the notion of an “authentic” experience, see- ing as “natural” those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre- existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resis- tance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonisation that con- tinually opposes reinscribing notions of “authentic” black identity. […]

1 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994, 74. 2 bell hooks (in lower case) is the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at San Francisco State University and at Yale, and in 1981 published Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. This text is considered to be a manifesto of Black feminism, but also of so-called “postmodern” thought.

The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African- Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate re- sponse to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of “the authority of experience.” There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black “essence” and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle.3

Thus rejected as unidimensional, racist, ineffective and even – as an accom- plice of White supremacy – counter-productive, the Afrocentric approach was critiqued by authors such as Paul Gilroy who had been engaged since the 1980s in describing how Black identity – in the sense of what it means to be Black – was constantly being reworked and reinterpreted to the point that the search for what it would truly be was fundamentally illusory. Indeed, for Gilroy, this quest sought the foundations of an immutable identity in a mythified pre- colonial Africa or in phenotypical characteristics, while the reality is that mi- grations – forced or voluntary – from Africa have produced innumerable re- compositions and cultural displacements linked not to a common origin or identity, but to a reworking of origins closely dependent upon the territo- ries upon which those who thus identify themselves as Black find themselves. Given this, not only does Gilroy subscribe to the arguments of bell hooks, no- tably on the collusion with European discourse,4 but he adds the nostalgic, Rousseauist, aspect of a lost golden age; an insistence on the individual and individual consciousness rather than on the nation; and finally the forgetting of contemporary Africa that prompts Gilroy to use the term Americocentrism in place of Afrocentrism.5 In The Black Atlantic, published in 1993, Gilroy re- peatedly returns to “an overarching Africentrism which can be read as invent- ing its own totalising conception of black culture” and promoting a “heavily mythologised Africanity that is itself stamped by its origins not in Africa but

3 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1990). Post- modern Culture is an electronic journal with no “paper version”. bell hooks’s text is available on the journal’s website at: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.990/hooks.990. 4 Gilroy dwelt at length on this collusion during a dialogue with bell hooks in London in 1992. Paul Gilroy, “A Dialogue with bell hooks,” in Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993, in particular p. 209-212. 5 Paul Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair”, in Gilroy, Small Acts, 197.