Trans-African Identity: Cultural Globalization and the Role of the Symbolic-Aesthethic Dimension in the Present Identity Construction Processes

Abstract

Globalization entails a process, in any case irreversible, of intensification of transnational, trans-societal and trans-cultural spaces, events, problems, economic transactions, conflicts and biographies, a process not necessarily unfolding in a centripetal, homogeneous and single way towards the formation of a single world society and culture but rather in a polycentric, multidimensional, “messy” way, dialectically contingent on the local. As far as the cultural dimension of globalization is concerned, the new concept of the “glocal” comes into being as an identity of synthesis whereby such different groups as black communities across the Atlantic reaffirm their feelings of belonging, reconstructing them before the invasion of the global into their lives. This synthesis between the global and the local takes place by means of a dichotomy: the global takes possession of the infrastructural, structural and ethic axiological levels, leading societies towards a certain uniformization; the local remains at the aesthetic level of symbols and icons, shaping self-referred differential identities. The paper aims at exploring one of this new, postmodern, aesthetic, disembodied from a concrete set of cultural practices: one that we have labeled as the trans-African or black trans-national identity: that of all the communities that claim an African descent around the world.