Diasporas

The Atlantic diasporas are the most recent of the global diasporas and are far better known and researched than the others. The diaspora in the United States often stands at the pedestal, the one against which to judge the identities of the other diasporas. The fact that Brazil has the largest African diaspora in the Americas, indeed in the world, is often forgotten, and so is the fact that in the Caribbean the African diaspora is the majority, rather than a minority population as in the United States. Debates about African diasporan identities have tended to be framed in terms of African cultural retentions or erasure on the one hand and diasporan adaptations and inventions on the other. Paul Gilroy's influential text, The Black Atlantic, is essentially a celebration of the supposedly new and distinctive Anglophone diaspora culture in which Africa is an irrelevant reality.

In effect, the two were not mutually exclusive, insofar as diasporic communities and consciousness were forged out of complex and sometimes contradictory encounters and negotiations between what Sheila Walker, in African Roots/American Cultures (2001), calls the three puzzles and Stuart Hall calls the presences in the Americas—the African, European, and Native American puzzles or presences. It is also important to note that there were continuous movements of people from Africa and the diaspora and back that kept connections alive.

On the whole, studies of African diasporas in the Americas continue to be heavily focused on national histories. In situations where the African puzzle or presence is marginalized, as is often the case in the United States, excavating the dynamic import of the African cultural, religious, artistic, social, economic, and political imprint on mainstream American society has produced some exciting scholarship. In societies that have tried to "whiten" themselves, such as Argentina, the object has been to demonstrate the African demographic presence. Similar attempts have been made to demystify Africa's "absence" in the histories of other countries in America's Southern cone: Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and in the histories of the United States' immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada, and to chronicle the contributions of African diasporas beyond picturesque folklore.

For Brazil, great store has been placed on explaining the remarkable survival and transformation of the Africans and their cultures as well as exposing the brutal realities behind the mystifications of race mixture and cultural syncretism. With their large African populations, the Caribbean islands reflect Brazil in terms of the evident demographic and cultural visibility of the African presence. Also as in Brazil, this presence, ubiquitous though it may be, has not always been valorized—at least not until the black consciousness movement of the 1970s. Perched in the Atlantic in the middle of the Middle Passage, as it were, the African diaspora in the Caribbean in fact embodies all the complex connections, crisscrossings, and cultural compositions of the African diasporas of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, Caribbean activists and intellectuals played a crucial role in all the transatlantic Pan-African ideologies and movements, from Garveyism to Negritude to socialism.