Imagined Communities: The African Diaspora and its Discontents

Abstract

The paper traces and analyzes the different developments in the fashioning or imagining of the African Diaspora, and in particular how the African diasporic discourse was produced, articulated, received and infused with authority, during the different periods in the history of blacks, especially those residing in the United States, while bringing examples from other African diasporic communities. It poses a series of questions that are both about ways of analyzing the African Diaspora and the positions and politics of such analysis in the present. Further, the paper argues that reference to the African Diaspora refers to one or more of the following elements: double-consciousness (W.E.B. Du Bois), a desire for a homeland for oppressed people, a defense of African attributes and a continuous engagement with contemporary global forces that affect all people including people of African descent. Engaging an interdisciplinary approach, it demonstrates how different forces were at work in creating communities in the African Diaspora that are both real and imagined.