Book Reviews the African Diaspora

New West Indian Guide Vol. 86, no. 1-2 (2012), pp. 109-196 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101731 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0028-9930 BOOK REVIEWS The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. PATRICK MANNING. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xxii + 394 pp. (Paper US$ 24.50) JOSEPH C. MILLER Department of History University of Virginia Charlottesville VA 22904, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Patrick Manning offers a strong and promising vision to overcome the con- ventional exclusion from history’s macro-narrative of Africans and peoples of African descent around the world. The modern historical discipline is implicitly (and often explicitly) framed around the nation-state, grand political scale, military conquests, and costly monumental construction. Indeed, beyond Hegel’s metaphysical faith in progressive western civilization, and his specific exclusion of Africa from history construed in these limiting terms, the professional discipline itself took shape in the nineteenth century as handmaiden of the consolidation of the modern – and profoundly militaristic – nation-state in Europe and throughout the Americas. The era was also heir to the abolitionist campaigns against maritime slaving and to emancipation movements central to creating several of the new nation-states. Indeed, the egalitarianism enshrined in national constitutions proclaimed the “nations” of ethnic, and in extreme cases, racial homogeneity. Of course, the virulence with which the custodians of these homogeneous “nations” asserted this illusory ideology was a direct and calculated contradiction of the extreme diversity of the older communities living in all of the territorial spaces thus defined as “states.” The newly emancipated citizens of African descent living in them all but disappeared in the glare of triumphal national identities asserted in narrowly Victorian, male, militaristic senses. Women had to fight to be included, and more recent European immigrants to the Americas were invited to assimilate to these national norms. The populations of African descent in the Americas, in Europe, and in parts of Asia sank without a trace below the surface of history-as-narrative-of-nation; Africa itself was understood primarily in terms of colonies defined as extensions of European nation-states. Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 06:27:55PM via free access 110 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 86 no. 1 & 2 (2012) Although in the last half century Africa and the populations of African descent elsewhere in the world have become subjects of widespread historical attention, and also as anthropological understandings of them have shifte d from exoticizing them as “different” to incorporating them into general models of human behavior, the western social sciences still struggle to transcend their own essential modernity and its implicit favoring of the kings, presidents, generals, and empires and the nation-states for which they are made to stand. Africanists like Manning accordingly struggle to find a place for Africans in the prevailing politico-military macronarrative of the discipline, and their marginality becomes an even more acute problem for world historians, which Manning also is, who strive for inclusiveness on global scales. Most resign themselves to the add-and-stir approach, featuring “kingdoms” in Africa and militant resisters elsewhere, paragons all of the political and military tones of their discipline. But this reactive mode inherently fails, since it retains history’s eurocentric celebration of destruc- tive power and, in the end, has to acknowledge that Africa was conquered militarily and that people of African descent elsewhere were excluded and dominated in political terms until, at least in some cases, very recently. Although world historians are not unaware of this dilemma, Manning’s “history through culture” makes the first significant move to offer an alterna- tive at this epistemological level: suppose, he asks, we understood people in the cultural terms, the communities, in which most of them live most of their lives and that frame the ways in which they end up acting politically or militarily, or not. Further, we understand cultures as comparable in the valid mean- ings that they channel for those who live in them. No one culture is superior to any other in an absolute sense, however varied the specific strategies that they facilitate may be. In this “history through culture,” the macro-narrative starts with a history of Africans creating viable ways of getting on in Africa, on their own, all appropriate to the historical contexts of the people who created them. The usual afro-victimizing components of the politico-military macro-narrative – the slave trade, domination in slavery, European conquests in Africa, subordination to colonial rule in Africa and racial exclusion elsewhere, and more recently allegedly failed nation-states and deep government indebtedness – in Manning’s book become the challenging contexts that Africans and their global progeny have not only met but have also transcended to infuse the world’s cultures with their own distinctive contributions. In spite of all the efforts to exclude Africans politically, the world’s populations have embraced vibrant African and Afro-derived cultural styles as if they offered a welcome sense of relief from the homogeneity, sterility, and anonymity of modernity. Manning thus arrives at five general periods, beginning with (1) a largely autonomously African background focused on the ideal of what he calls “ser- vice to the community,” with added emphasis on Africa’s long history before 1600 of connections with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean rim. The Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 06:27:55PM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 111 Portuguese, active since the 1440s along Africa’s coasts, merely extended this older global presence, and even what Manning sees as a turn toward increasing hierarchy in Africa in the sixteenth century forms part of an apparent global age of empires. (2) The trauma of intensified slaving between 1600 and 1800 made this era one of “survival,” both on the continent and under enslavement in the fast-growing diasporas in the Americas, in the Indian Ocean region, and in the Muslim Mediterranean; here readers will find quite a competent and comprehensive review of the many streams of recent scholarship on the sub- ject. What followed was (3) a nineteenth century of “emancipation,” starting with Usuman dan Fodio’s 1804 call to arms to protect the Muslims of what is now northern Nigeria from the slaving then growing in the region and ending with recognition of Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia as members of the community of modern nation-states then achieving definition, even if otherwise at the expense of colonial conquests in Africa. The modern nation-state in turn (4) frames the quest for “citizenship” in the first half of the twentieth century (precisely 1900-1960), with leadership accorded to Afro-Cubans, accents on African-Americans’ growing cultural visibility in music, literature, and other cultural spheres outside of national politics, but countered by the political cre- ativity and originality of nationalist leaders in Africa. With growing civil rights in the diaspora and independence in Africa, the last half century (5) has been an enfranchised quest for political “equality,” though not without setbacks on the continent in public health, indebtedness, distortions of the promise of par- liamentary regimes in Africa, and a western-toned global culture. Readers may want to consider the extent to which Manning’s metanarra- tive escapes the framework of the nation-state paradigmatic in the discipline. His narrative features movements of people across national boundaries to create a multinational diaspora and emphasizes economic swings of global proportions and the global reach of modern racism. The transnational mobility of many of the leading early twentieth-century Africans and afro-descen- dants – often unwelcome at home – certainly shows the value of setting people of notable mobility and adaptability in their full diasporic settings. Manning marshals an impressive range of people in Africa and abroad facing parallel problems and coming up with comparable solutions. But would he have told this history more through culture by featuring developments within the diasporic communities, or among Africans, rather than largely showing the engagements of the group as a whole with European military and political power, followed by global consumer culture? The thoughtful coherence, accuracy, and great breadth of the book – not only geographically but also in the many fields of human endeavor and the different (and often technical) academic disciplines that it discusses knowl- edgeably – will surely make it a popular introduction to a vast range of scholarship, personalities, and issues in courses in all subfields of African- American studies; in that context it has the decided advantage of integrating Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 06:27:55PM via free access 112 New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 86 no. 1 & 2 (2012) the often specialized field of African studies in terms accessible to novices. A considerable index will guide readers reliably to the numerous detailed specifics incorporated into the book. Manning is to be congratulated for yet another capacious, innovative contribution to our understanding of African and world history, as intricately embedded, each in the other, at every level. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. DAVID ELTIS & DAVID RICHARDSON. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2010. xxvi + 307 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00) TED MARIS-WOLF Department of History University of Louisiana Lafayette LA 70504, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved begins with an epigraph to the “Sixty Million and more” individuals who struggled to survive and overcome the dehumanizing institutions of transatlantic slave trading and New World slavery.

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