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BOOK Reviews Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in The New West Indian Guide Vol. 83, no. 1&2 (2009), pp. 121–186 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100083 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 1382-2373 BOOK REVIEWS Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. KEVIN A. YELVINGTON (ed.). Santa Fe NM: SAR Press, 2006. xii + 501 pp. (Paper US$ 34.95) AISHA KHAN Department of Anthropology New York University New York NY10003, U.S.A. <[email protected]> This collection is based on a School of American Research seminar held in 1999 and organized by Kevin A. Yelvington, which brought together scholars to work toward new directions in interdisciplinary and critical research on African diasporas in the Americas. Variously engaging from different angles the scholarship of Melville and Frances Herskovits, seminar participants explored the social, political, and cultural contexts of knowledge production: what we know about Africa in the Americas, what has been truncated or omit- ted, what alternative ways of knowing might be possible. Keeping blackness central without measuring authenticity or essentializing, and keeping anthro- pology central without fixing disciplinary borders, the volume engages in fresh ways such abiding questions as the context-contingent construction of categories, the relationship between empirical research and theory building, and the nature of cultural change. The range of chapter topics is held together by a dialogic approach, or, what J. Lorand Matory calls “live dialogue” (p. 171), an alternative metaphor to such conventional concepts in Afro-Americanist anthropology as collec- tive memory, survivals, and creolization. Illustrated in Matory’s chapter by his research on religion in Nigeria and Brazil, this enduring dialogue met- aphor “represents homelands not as the past but as the contemporaries of their diasporas, and diverse diasporic locales not as divergent streams but as interlocutors in supraregional conversations” where there is “mutual trans- formation over time” (p. 183). The theme of dialogue is discernable in all of the chapters and creatively connects them not in seamless repetition but in a reinforced message. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:02:20AM via free access 122 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 83 no. 1 & 2 (2009) The volume is divided into four sections: “Critical Histories of Afro- Americanist Anthropologies,” with contributions by Yelvington, Sally Price, and Richard Price; “Dialogues in Practice,” containing the essays of Matory, John W. Pulis, Joko Sengova, and Theresa A. Singleton; “The Place of Blackness,” which includes chapters by Sabiyha Robin Prince, Arlene Torres, and Peter Wade; and “Critical Histories/Critical Theories,” offer- ing an overview commentary by Faye V. Harrison. Yelvington examines the anthropological discourse on Africa and the New World through the work of Melville Herskovits, particularly the institution building and social networks that developed from his relationships with interlocutors Fernando Ortiz, Jean Price-Mars, and Arthur Ramos. Sally Price considers the changing evalu- ations of visual art in the African diaspora, focusing on Maroon clothing, Southern American quilts, and gallery art in order to assess scholars’ interpre- tation of the relationships among these art forms, African textile traditions, and the culture history of the African diaspora. Data often dismissed as trivial are nonetheless always in dialogue with broader context; both, she argues, must be studied simultaneously to fully understand the diaspora’s “cultural fabric” (p. 111). Richard Price expands on his and Sidney Mintz’s The Birth of African-American Culture. He engages major debates that ensued from the theoretical and methodological exploration of African American pasts, clari- fying what is at stake. While dialogue typically ends in winners all around, in the sense that open discussion is always beneficial, here it is clear why, for so many of us, Price’s position prevails. Interested in the eighteenth-century diaspora of black loyalists who left America’s Revolutionary War for Jamaica, Pulis provides a close reading of African American folk preacher George Lisle’s codifying document about the religious practices of Native Baptism (Anabaptism) and subsequent influ- ences on indigenous forms of Afro-Jamaican Christianity. Sengova explores “Gullah/Geechee” language and culture for connections between Southern American and African cultures through a reflexive lens of being both sub- ject and object of study. Singleton explores the role of archaeology in schol- arly dialogues about the African diaspora, exemplified by her research in Cuba. She argues, against the grain, that African American archaeology and diaspora scholarship inform one another and are interdependent. Prince examines narratives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Africans and their descendants in New York City, emphasizing the political economy of labor. She aims to contribute to discussions about African con- tinuities, not by seeking authentic survivals but by “conceptually restoring Africans to this time period and making this history available ... in compel- ling and creative ways” (p. 321). Torres looks at the relationship between museums and ethnography, investigating the multiple dialogues that go into Puerto Rican identity construction, legitimization, and contestation in exhibits and other public events at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:02:20AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 123 History. Wade focuses on popular music, showing that what is considered “black” or “African” in Colombia has varied historically according to view- point, agenda, and practice. He argues for understanding blackness in terms of a balance between change and continuity, and between culture’s discursive constructions and their manifestation in daily life. In a space of her own, Harrison nicely elaborates on the volume’s themes and issues. She makes a number of good points, including some close to this reviewer’s own heart: that many of the latest trends in diaspora studies privi- lege recent dispersions, but studying the legacies of historic diasporas prom- ises a great deal for theorizing diasporas (p. 383); that we need continuous interrogation of the anthropological canon to reevaluate works considered irrelevant or secondary by earlier or currently fashionable trends (p. 392); and that these efforts must be informed by an “ongoing engagement with ethnographic subjects” and all the interpretations embedded in our interac- tions with them (p. 392). In addition to its thoughtful discussions, what makes this volume espe- cially welcome is that it offers some frank observations that needed to be made. There is, for example, Prince’s critique of academia’s lethargic attention to the public dissemination of knowledge; Singleton’s challenge to doubts, from surprising corners, about the potential of archaeology to contribute to African diaspora studies; Sally Price’s careful yet unflinching interrogation of some of Robert Farris Thompson’s claims about African/ American connections in the arts; and Harrison’s observation that a number of early diaspora scholars concerned with the centrality of the black Atlantic to the culture and political economy of modernity (e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Sylvia Wynter, St. Clair Drake) have been overshadowed by attention to Paul Gilroy – a worthy scholar but not without important predecessors. Harrison refreshingly asks whether anthropologists will “engage in a more democratic and less starstruck read- ing strategy” (p. 390) if they bear in mind that thinkers are situated within broader relations of intellectual production. There is a large and growing cross-disciplinary literature on African diasporas. In this collection, contributors’ thoughts about what directions we should pursue propel us forward by bringing us back to reflections on how both diaspora studies and anthropology should be done. REFERENCE MINTZ, SIDNEY W. & RICHARD PRICE, 1992. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:02:20AM via free access 124 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 83 no. 1 & 2 (2009) Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. LINDA M. HEYWOOD & JOHN K. THORNTON. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii + 370 pp. (Paper US$ 22.99) JAME S H. SWEET Department of History University of Wisconsin Madison WI 53706, U.S.A. <[email protected]> In 1996, Ira Berlin published the first of a series of pathbreaking works in which he developed the argument that the Charter Generation of North American slave society consisted largely of “Atlantic Creoles.” In Berlin’s formulation, Atlantic Creoles were “cosmopolitan men and women of African descent … Their knowledge of the larger Atlantic World, the fluidity with which they moved in it, and their chameleonlike ability to alter their identity moderated the force of chattel bondage … Atlantic creoles found themselves very much at home in their new environment” (1996; 2003:6, 32). Linda Heywood and John Thornton utilize Berlin’s idea as the concep- tual framework for their new book, but with one crucial alteration. Instead of Atlantic Creoles emerging from the relationships between European and African traders in West African coastal entrepots, Heywood and Thornton
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