What particular insights have anthropologists brought to the study of West African diasporas?

Course elements of reference:

• Diaspora is a long-term feature of West African history. 
• This diaspora has taken many forms, from the slave diasporas of the middle passage and to North Africa, but also through the migrations of West Africans to other parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe in the twentieth century. 
• Diaspora has been a special vantage point to think about geopolitics and global history. 
• The so-called second diaspora, which resulted in the growth of West African communities in the metropolitan centres of Europe and North America, through the lens of music and fashion. 
• In 2016, the Senegalese philosopher and musician Felwine Sarr predicted that the African continent would soon overtake China and the other BRICS – the acronym coined to associate the five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – as a new ‘global creative and economic force redrawing the picture of the world’. 
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a key agent in this process.  Not only is the DRC, with the largest coltan and cobalt reserves in the world, the centre in the global dynamics of extractive capitalism, it is also the birthplace of La Sape: Société des ambianceurs et des personnes elegantes (‘Society of Atmosphere-setters and Elegant People’). What we see here is a kind of reverse diasporic movement:sapeurs travel to Paris and Brussels to buy expensive European designer clothes, but their main aim is to return to Kinshasa and Brazzaville to dress up in the latest style to impress their countrymen and women. 
• This spectacular subculture illustrates Sarr’s argument that Africa is the motor of a cultural revolution. 

Key watching: 

Portraying the Sordid Shadow of Colonial History: Yinka Shonibare | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 4 (a video on the British-Nigerian Artist Yinka Shonibare whose work and life engages with themes of diaspora and Afro-modernity) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0rAIMV0k4M

Key readings:

• Arnfred, S. 2019. ‘Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective’, in Women in Africa and the Diaspora, N. Achebe and C. Robertson (eds.), 295–315. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Diouf, M. 2000. ‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture 12 (3): 679–702.
• Lovejoy, P.E. 2000. ‘Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora’, in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, P.E. Lovejoy (ed.), 1–29. London: Continuum.
• Akyeampong, E. 2000. ‘Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africans’, African Affairs 99: 183–216.
• Gandoulou, J.-D. 2008. ‘Between Paris and Bacongo & Dandies in Bacongo’, in P. Geschiere, B. Meyer, and P. Pels (eds.), Readings in Modernity in Africa, 194–205. Suffolk: James Currey.

Background readings:

• Babou, C.A. 2002. ‘Brotherhood Solidarity, Education and Migration: The Role of the Dahiras among the Murid Community of New York’, African Affairs 101: 151–170.
• Buggenhagen, B. 2012. Muslim Families in Global Senegal: Money Takes Care of Shame. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Ebron, P. A. 2002. Performing Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  
• Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
• Green, T. 2011. The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Harris, H. 2006. Yoruba in Diaspora: An African Church in London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Johnson, M.C. 2006. ‘“The Proof is on my Palm”: Debating Ethnicity, Islam and Ritual in a New African Diaspora’, Journal of Religion in Africa 36 (1): 50–77.
• Mann, K. and E.G. Bay (eds.). 2001. Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. London: Frank Cass. 
• Matory, J.L. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
• Okpewho, I. and N. Nzegwu (eds.). 2009. The New African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
• Palmié, S. (ed.). 2008. Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions. Leiden: Brill.
• Rasmussen, S.J. 2003. ‘When the Field Space Comes to the Home Space. New Constructions of Ethnographic Knowledge in a New African Diaspora’, Anthropological Quarterly 76 (1): 7–32. 
• Saffran, J .1991. ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies Myths of a Homeland and Return’, Diaspora 1 (1): 83–99.
• Schramm, K. 2010. African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
• Stoller, P. 2003. ‘Marketing Afrocentricity: West African Trade Networks in North America’, in New African Diasporas, K. Koser (ed.), 71–94. London: Routledge.
• Ter Haar, G. 1998. Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe. Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press. 
• White, B. 2002. ‘Congolese Rumba and other Cosmopolitanisms’, Cahiers d’études africaines 168:  663–686. 
• Zeleza P, T. 2005. ‘Rewriting the African diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic’, African Affairs 104 (414): 35–68. 
• Also relevant is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah (2013).