Diasporic Africa: A reader, edited by Michael A. Gomez
本书收录了2000年世界非洲散居研究协会会议的13篇论文，探讨非洲散居者的身份、文化延续、宗教和政治参与，但主题分散，并非全面导论。
Despite its subtitle, this volume is not a ‘reader’ in the conventional sense of a representative selection of texts in a given field, but comprises papers from a conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (of which the editor Michael Gomez is Director) held at New York in 2000. This apparently represents a selection, rather than the totality, of papers presented, but the basis for the selection and, therefore, the intended focus of the volume are not very clearly spelt out. The reader's orientation is not helped by the fact that the editorial ‘Introduction’, sub-titled ‘Diasporic Africa: A View from History’, is a free-standing essay—in effect, a summary version of Gomez's recently published overview of the history of the African diaspora, Reversing Sail (2005), and excellent within its own terms—rather than a presentation of the papers which follow. The publisher's back-cover ‘blurb’ indicates that the ‘primary theme’ of the volume is ‘a rigorous interrogation of “identity”', but although this is certainly a central concern of many of the papers included, it is not, in fact, applicable to them all. It is also claimed that it offers a ‘broader view’ and a ‘more comprehensive approach’ than the conventional concentration on the transportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas. However, most of the 13 papers included relate to the African diaspora in the Americas, and more particularly to its anglophone component, with no less than 7 papers that wholly or mainly focus on the USA, with 1 on Jamaica and 2 on Brazil. A broadening of the concept of the diaspora is represented only by the inclusion of one paper on the black African presence in Morocco, and two on Europe (France and Italy). The papers are grouped into three unequal sections, each with a brief editorial introduction of its own, but the implicit thematic focus is, at best, only partially realized. Part I (comprising three papers) deals with the persistence (but also the transformation) of elements of African culture into the Americas, including techniques of indigo cultivation and processing (in South Carolina), as well as ritual, drumming and dance (in Brazil). Part II (four papers) deals with aspects of religion in the diaspora, which evidently overlaps with the preceding topic. In fact, two of the papers in this section also advance claims of continuities from Africa to the Americas, though in one case the argument (that a Roman Catholic religious community of black women founded in Baltimore in 1829 reflected a tradition of female prominence in religious and other activities derived from the Dahomey area of West Africa) seems tenuous. The other two papers involve cases in which an alleged ‘homeland’ was imaginatively constructed, rather than straightforwardly remembered: the African Hebrew Israelite Community in the USA, which identified African-Americans with the ancient Israelites (and undertook ‘resettlement’ in modern Israel in 1967), and the Rastafarians in Jamaica (here studied through the symbolism of their architecture). Part III (six papers) claims to explore diasporic Africans ‘in relation to the state or to international political processes’, a vague formula that in practice encompasses a very diverse range of topics. These include the legal/political status of black Africans in Morocco and in France, the US African-American political activism (in the Garveyite Universal Negro Improvement Association and the leftist African Black Brotherhood in the 1920s, discussed with reference to specifically female participation; and the Black Panthers of the 1960s) and ‘literary expressions’ (exclusively anglophone, mainly USA) of ‘diaspora consciousness’. Despite the fragmentation of focus, this section includes an explicit ‘broadening’ of the concept of diaspora, to include secondary displacements within the Atlantic world: the Black Panthers are discussed (by Rose C. Thevenin) in relation to the flight of Eldridge Cleaver and other activists to Cuba, in the (predictably, unfulfilled) hope that it would serve as a base for the re-exportation of revolution back to the USA; and the consideration of literary expressions (by Wendy C. Walters) is mainly concerned with the representation of ‘homelands’ in the diaspora, rather than in Africa, by writers who had migrated within North America or to Europe. A final chapter (by Asale Angel-Ajani) uniquely engages with a distinctively contemporary dimension of the African diaspora, dealing with the trafficking of women from Africa for prostitution in modern Italy. Many of the essays included in this volume are excellent, and all of them raise issues of interest; it seems more likely to be cherry-picked for particular items, than serving as a ‘comprehensive’ introduction to the study of the African diaspora, but this is no damning criticism.