Pan African Agency and the Cultural Political Economy of the Black City: the Case of the African World Festival in Detroit
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PAN AFRICAN AGENCY AND THE CULTURAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE BLACK CITY: THE CASE OF THE AFRICAN WORLD FESTIVAL IN DETROIT By El-Ra Adair Radney A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree African American and African Studies - Doctor of Philosophy 2019 ABSTRACT PAN AFRICAN AGENCY AND THE CULTURAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE BLACK CITY: THE CASE OF THE AFRICAN WORLD FESTIVAL IN DETROIT By El-Ra Adair Radney Pan African Agency and the Cultural Political Economy of the Black City is a dissertation study of Detroit that characterizes the city as a ‘Pan African Metropolis’ within the combined histories of Black Metropolis theory and theories of Pan African cultural nationalism. The dissertation attempts to reconfigure Saint Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Jr’s theorization on the Black Metropolis to understand the intersectional dynamics of culture, politics, and economy as they exist in a Pan African value system for the contemporary Black city. Differently from the classic Black Metropolis study, the current study incorporates African heritage celebration as a major Black life axes in the maintenance of the Black city’s identity. Using Detroit as a case study, the study contends that through their sustained allegiance to African/Afrocentric identity, Black Americans have enhanced the Black city through their creation of a distinctive cultural political economy, which manifests in what I refer to throughout the study as a Pan African Metropolis. I argue that the Pan African Metropolis emerged more visibly and solidified itself during Detroit’s Black Arts Movement in the 1970s of my youth (Thompson, 1999). Its emergence crystalized a variety of Black life socio-political enhancements for the Black community. These enhancements were especially noted in the way it cultivated Black racial pride and love within Pan African Diasporic solidarity what I refer to in the study as Black agency. This was achieved in major part through its constructions of various Black place-making and the creation of Afro-centric marketplaces that constitute a long trajectory of adaptive-vitality (Karenga, 2010) in the cultural and economic formation of Detroit. This thesis is supported through a qualitative case study of Detroit’s African World Festival (AWF) and conducts field research and direct observational study of the annual festival’s producers and consumers. In doing so, the study draws from a primary field research study of Detroit and applies interdisciplinary African American Studies’ mixed methodologies that combine Africana philosophy, cultural studies (Morley, & Chen, 1996) and qualitative observational methodologies of grounded theory to arrive at significant conclusions about the Black city. The conclusions observed here constitute three insightful revelations about the key themes of Pan African agency, Pan African place-making and/or African heritage celebration/preservation. The concept of Pan African agency engulfs the later two themes of Pan African place-making and African heritage preservation. As such, the findings conclude that the Black city’s Pan African agency reveals alternative norms and values about Black culture in Detroit that are not represented in mainstream representations. Additionally, the dissertation offers representative interventions in the ways that Black cities are understood, or misunderstood, and finally these conclusions for the study relate to wider systems of power, in this case the challenges to self-determination, equality and political freedom attended by Black cultural nationalism. Copyright By EL-RA ADAIR RADNEY 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ...................................................................................................vi Chapter 1 Detroit as Black Metropolis: An Introduction ...........................................................1 Chapter 2 Theorizing the Cultural Politics the Black City: A Literature Review ......................35 Chapter 3 Black Placemaking in a Pan African Detroit: A Cultural History .............................78 Chapter 4 Black City Festivals and Detroit’s African World Festival: A Case Study ...............125 Chapter 5 Black Detroiters as Producers of Pan African Culture: A Finding I ..........................177 Chapter 6 Black Detroiters as Consumers of Pan African Culture: A Finding II ......................241 Chapter 7 Detroit as Pan African Metropolis: An Analysis .......................................................285 Chapter 8 Pan Africanizing the Black Metropolis Theory: A Conclusion .................................331 APPENDIX ...............................................................................................................374 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................376 v LIST OF TABLES Table 7.1 ....................................................................................................................376 Percentage of Support for African Americans Autonomy in Mass Public Opinion Table 7.2 ....................................................................................................................376 Survey Data of Black People on Black Community vi Chapter 1 Detroit as Black Metropolis: An Introduction Introduction “Welcome to the African city of Detroit”! Draped in a yellow West African bou bou dress and a matching yellow “gele” head wrap, former Detroit Council Jo Ann Watson uttered this greeting to an audience of MSU students and faculty at a Detroit community day gathering. The intentionality of Watson’s words divulges Diasporic symbolisms, orientations and philosophies, which capture my characterization of Detroit’s as a ‘Pan African, Black Metropolis’. Watson’s claim emphasizes Detroit’s norms of embodied Afrocentric identity that are upheld from a foundational imprint of Pan African legacies, Black self-determination, and Black (spatial) resistance against attempted white racial dominance in the African American encounter with the modern city. These key themes are principally interwoven in the cultural politics of the Black city, wherein they are naturalized in the everyday life of Detroit African Americans. The authority they bear in the topology of the Black community becomes central to a new dispensation of the Black Metropolis while considering the phenomenon deeply to a notion of ‘the Pan African Metropolis’. Watson’s unapologetic Pan African life, like many Detroit stories contemplates the shifting gears of the Black Metropolis, and grounds a new engagement of the Black urban study through Pan African ethnographies. All in all, I argue that a distinguishing identity of the Black city is its proud connection to African heritages. This strong connection is charted here through the ‘beloved’ national occurrence and annual popularity of Pan African festivals. In doing so I excavate the existential values of Pan Africanism as a healthy (healing) philosophy and 1 good “guidance system” (Morrison, 1976) in Black urban life and in its narrative. Thereby, I posit it as not just a Black nationalist-cultural political ideology, but as a theory of Black existential philosophy, which through its centered actions cultivates a form of Black agency. This Black agency is represented through various forms of Black placemaking and Black adaptive-vitality in Black urban formation (Karenga, 2010). Moreover, Black agency as implied here is described through the capacity of Black placemaking and Black adaptive-vitality and the lens of location theory (Asante, 2001; Karenga, 2010; Hunter, Patillo, Robinson & Taylor, 2016). Hence, for a reasonable comprehension of the dissertation’s argument, it is important to understand the relationship between Black agency, Black placemaking, the Black adaptive-vitality paradigm (Karenga, 2010) and Afrocentric location theory (Asante, 2001) as metatheory and methodological approach in this urban study. The currently alleged death of Pan Africanism (Carnell, 2018) by pundits seems to be willfully disconnected (for various suspicious reasons) from the vibrant pulse of Black reality. Against this grain, the thesis formulates that the maintenance and enduring factors of Pan African identity constitutes an adaptive-vitality phenomena (Karenga, 2010) and a progressive state of location/Black self-determined standpoint (Asante, 2001) present in Black life. The paradigm of adaptive-vitality serves as a historical and sociological reconstructive method to counter the way the life rhythm of African American character and progress is preponderantly misjudged and demonized. This ‘intentional misjudgment’ as Ralph Ellison (Karenga, 2010) refers to it, occurs heavily via methods of study and observation influenced and informed by the traditions of 2 scientific racism (Muhammad, 2010). These forms of scientific racism as they show up in the urban study are aired outstandingly in the paradigms of Black pathology and Black deficit. This Black deficit/Black pathology urban assessment is now well known in the so-called Moynihan School (Karenga, 2010) To counter this, the paradigm of adaptive vitality, which originates from Black sociologists, recommends that the tenor of adaptation by African Americans to socio- economic pressures and constraints should be highlighted in its ‘positive strengths’, and in proportion to the ongoing historical forms of anti-Black racism. In this view, Pan Africanism is not a deficient project, but through its connected ways