THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN GERMANY - AFRICANS IN GERMANY

Review Article: Afrikanische Handschriften in Deutschland

Review Article: SOCIAL DETERMINANTS FOR THE POLITICAL ATTITUDES OF AFRICAN AND ASIATIC STUDENTS IN GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES SOZIALE DETERMINANTEN DER POLITISCHEN EINSTELLUNG DER AFRIKANISCHEN UND ASIATISCHEN STUDENTEN IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGEN LAENDERN

Asiatic (039500); Attitude, Attitudes, Attitudinal (044500); German,

Germany, Germans (193400); Political, Politically, Politicalization ; (see also Politics) (339690); Student, Students (448200) IDENTIFIERS: AFRICA : &ASIATIC STUDENTS IN GERMANY, POLITICAL ATTITUDES OF,; ASIA : & AFRICAN STUDENTS IN GERMANY, POLITICAL ATTITUDES OF,; ATTITUDE : POLITICAL, OF AFRICAN & ASIATIC STUDENTS IN GERMANY,; GERMAN : POLITICAL ATTITUDES OF ASIAN & AFRICAN STUDENTS IN,; POLITICAL : ATTITUDES OF AFRICAN & ASIATIC STUDENTS IN GERMANY,; STUDENT : ASIAN & AFRICAN IN GERMANY, POLITICAL ATTITUDES OF,; SECTION HEADINGS: sociology of education- sociology of education (1432)  

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Review Article: The World Council of Churches' Program to Combat Racism, the African people's republics, and the German churches

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Review Article: Jahrbuch 1997: Globalisierung der Wissenschaft: Sueden-Forschung im Norden; wie nuetzlich ist Entwicklungslaenderforschung im Norden fuer die berufliche, wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Reintegration afrikanischer und asiatischer Absolventen deutscher Universitaeten im Heimatland? Beitraege zu einem interkulturellen Wissenschaftsverstaendn is und zu den internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen.

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Review Article: Reintegrationsprobleme afrikanischer Aus- und Fortbildungsgaeste der Bundesrepublik beim Einsatz in ihren Heimatlaendern (social, economic and professional problems).

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Review Article: Track & battlefield: a new study shows that the gender gap in running is not behaving the way it was expected to,

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EVERYBODY knows that the gap in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. In fact, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66 per cent agreed that "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most highly publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's records would equalize by 1998 for marathons, and during the early twenty-first century for all other distances.

This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature and to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.

When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers. So, we began an in-depth study.

Our conclusion: Although the 1998 outdoor running season has not yet started, we can already discard Ward and Whipp's forecast: women will not catch up to men in the marathon next year. The gender gap between the best marathon times remains the equivalent of the woman record holder's losing by more than 2.6 miles. In fact, we can now be certain that the fastest women will never equal the fastest men in any standard-length race. Contrary to all expectations, the overall gender gap has been widening throughout the Nineties. While men's times have continued to get faster, world-class women are running noticeably slower than in the Eighties. Why? It's a fascinating tale of sex discrimination, ethnic superiority, hormones, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconfirms the unpopular fact that biological differences between the sexes and the races will continue to play a large, perhaps even a growing, role in human affairs.

First, though, why is running the best sport for carefully measuring changes in the gender gap? For one thing, men and women currently compete under identical conditions in ten Olympic running events. In general, track is ideal for statistical study because it's such a simple sport: all that matters is the times. It's also probably the most universal sport. Track medalists in the 1996 Olympics included an Australian aborigine as well as runners from Burundi, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, Mozambique, Norway, and Namibia. Running is so fundamental to life and so cheap that most children on earth compete at it enough to reveal whether they possess any talent for it.

As Ward and Whipp noted, the gender gap did narrow sharply up through the Eighties. Let's focus on those ten directly comparable races. Back in 1970, women's world-record times averaged 21.3 per cent higher (worse) than men's. But in the Seventies women broke or equaled world records 79 times, compared to only 18 times for men, lowering the average gender gap in world records to 13.3 per cent. In the Eighties, women set 47 records compared to only 23 by men, and the gender gap shrank to just 10.2 per cent. Further narrowing seemed inevitable in the Nineties.

Yet male runners are now pulling away from female runners. Women's performances have collapsed, with only 5 record-setting efforts so far in this decade, compared to 30 by men. (The growth of the gender gap has even been accelerating. Men broke or tied records 7 times in 1997, the most in any year since 1968.) The average gender gap for world records has increased from 10.2 per cent to 11.0. And since four of the five women's "records" set in the Nineties occurred at extremely questionable Chinese meets (as we shall see later), it's probably more accurate to say that for relatively respectable records, men are ahead of women 30 to 1, and the average gender gap has grown from 10.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent.

Despite all the hype about 1996 being the "Women's Olympics," in the Atlanta Games' central events -- the footraces -- female medalists performed worse relative to male medalists than in any Olympics since 1972. In the 1988 Games the gender gap for medalists was 10.9 per cent, but it grew to 12.2 per cent in 1996. Even stranger is the trend in absolute times. Track fans expect slow but steady progress; thus, nobody is surprised that male medalists became 0.5 per cent faster from the 1988 to the 1996 Olympics. Remarkably, though, women medalists became 0.6 per cent slower over the same period.

Why is the gender gap growing? In the longer races -- from 800m to the marathon, but especially in the 5,000m and 10,000m races -- the main reason is discrimination, society forcing women to stay home and have six babies. Of course, we're not talking about the industrialized world, but about a few polygamous, high-birth-rate African nations. All 17 male distance record-settings in the Nineties belong to Africans -- Kenyans (9), Ethiopians (5), Algerians (2), Moroccans (1). A culture can encourage women to pursue glory in athletics or to have a half-dozen kids, but not both. Thus, Kenya's high birth rate (not long ago it was more than five times West Germany's) has contributed to a swelling torrent of brilliant male runners, but has kept any Kenyan woman from winning Olympic gold.

These facts, though, raise a disturbing question: Why is women's distance running so debilitated by sexism in these African countries? Because, as Willie Sutton might say, that's where the talent is. You can't understand women's running without comparing it to men's running, and that has become incomprehensible unless you grasp how, as equality of opportunity has improved in men's track, ethnic inequality of result has skyrocketed. The African tidal wave culminated on August 13, 1997, when Wilson Kipketer, a Kenyan running for Denmark, broke the great Sebastian Coe's 800m mark, erasing the last major record held by any man not of African descent. African superiority is now so manifest that even Burundi, a small East African hell-hole, drubbed the U.S. in the men's distance races at our own Atlanta Games.

Yet, there are striking systematic differences even between African ethnic groups. This can best be seen by graphing each population's bell curve for running. The Olympic events from 100 meters to the marathon run along the horizontal axis, and the percentage of the 100 best times in history go along the vertical axis. For example, the distances Kenyan men are best suited for are indicated by a bell curve centered on the 3,000m steeplechase, where Kenyans own the 53 fastest times ever. These East Africans are outclassed in the 100m and 200m, but become competitive in the 400m, then are outstanding from 800m through 10,000m, before tailing off slightly in the marathon (42,000m).

In contrast, for the black men of West Africa and the West African Diaspora (living, e.g., in the U.S., Nigeria, Cuba, Brazil, Canada, Britain, and France), only the right half of their bell curve is visible. They absolutely monopolize the 100m. Men of West African descent have broken the 10-second barrier 134 times; nobody else has ever done it. They remain almost as overwhelming in the 200m and 400m, then drop off to being merely quite competitive in the 800m. They are last sighted in the 1500m, and then are absolutely not a factor in the long-distance events.

While there are the usual nature v. nurture arguments over why African runners win so much, there is little possibility that culture alone can account for how much West African and East African runners differ in power v. endurance. Track is ultracompetitive: coaches test all their runners at different distances until they find where they are best. Even in the unlikely event that Kenya's coaches were too self-defeating to exploit their 100m talent, and Jamaica's leadership was ignoring their 10,000m prodigies, American and European coaches and agents would swoop in and poach them. No, what's far more plausible is that both West and East Africans are performing relatively close to their highly distinct biological limits.

None of this conforms to American obsessions about race. First, we dread empirical studies of human biodiversity, worrying that they will uncover the intolerable reality of racial supremacy. Is this fear realistic? Consider merely running: Are West Africans generally better runners than whites? In sprints, absolutely. In distance races, absolutely not. Overall racial supremacy is nonsense; specific ethnic superiorities are a manifold reality.

Second, our crude racial categories blur over many fascinating genetic differences between, for example, groups as similar in color as West and East Africans. And even within the highlands of East Africa there are different track bell curves: Ethiopians, while almost as strong as Kenyans at 5,000m and longer, are not a factor below 3,000m. And the African dominance is not just a black thing. Moroccans and Algerians tend to be more white than black, yet they possess a bell curve similar to, if slightly less impressive than, Kenyans'. Further research will uncover many more fascinating patterns: for example, Europeans appear to be consistently mediocre, achieving world-class performances primarily at distances like 800m and the marathon that fall outside of the prime ranges for West Africans and Kenyans.

These ethnic patterns among male runners are crucial to understanding the causes of the growth in the gender gap, because it appears that women runners possess the same natural strengths and weaknesses as their menfolk. For example, the bell curves for men and women runners of West African descent are equally sprint-focused. If a nation's women perform very differently from its men, something is peculiar. With high-birth-rate African countries like Kenya and Morocco, it's clear that the social systems restrain marriageable women from competing. This offers hope that the distance gender gap will someday stop widening. Indeed, since the Kenyan birth rate began dropping a few years back, we have begun to see a few outstanding Kenyan women.

The gender gap is widening not just because men (especially African distance runners) are running faster today, but also because women (especially East European sprinters) are now running slower.

From 1970 to 1989, white women from Communist countries accounted for 71 of the 84 records set at 100m - 1500m. In contrast, Eastern European men accounted for exactly zero of the 23 male records. Those memorable East German Frauleins set records 49 times in just the sprints and relays (100m - 400m). This was especially bizarre because men of West African descent were utterly dominating white men in sprinting. Another oddity of that era is that Communist women set only 7 (and East Germans none) of the 48 female records in the 5k, 10k, and marathon.

The crash of women's running was brought about by two seemingly irrelevant events in the late Eighties: Ben Johnson got caught, and the Berlin Wall fell. At the 1988 Olympics, in the most anticipated 100m race of all time, Johnson, the surly Jamaican-Canadian sprinter who could benchpress 396 pounds, demolished Carl Lewis with a jaw-dropping world record of 9.79 seconds. Two days later Johnson was stripped of his medal and record because his urine contained steroids. Embarrassed that it had let a man called "Benoid" by other runners (his massively muscled body was so flooded with artificial male hormones that his eyeballs had turned yellow) become the biggest star in the sport, track officialdom finally got fairly serious about testing for steroids in 1989.

Then the Berlin Wall fell, and we learned exactly how East German coaches enabled white women to outsprint black women: by chemically masculinizing them. The East German regime understood that sports success is based on manliness, which (in its lowest-common-denominator definition of muscles and aggression) isn't a social but a biochemical construct, one that their technicians could churn out by the liter. Obviously, the Communists weren't the only dopers, but they were the best organized. Newsweek reported, "Under East Germany's notorious State Plan 14.25, more than 1,000 scientists, trainers, and physicians spent much of the 1980s developing better ways to drug the nation's athletes." East German coaches are now finally going on trial for forcing enormous doses of steroids on uninformed teenagers. The Soviet Union, although less brilliant in the laboratory, also engaged in cheating on an impressively industrial scale.

Even today, this pattern of women's records coming mostly from Communist countries continues: four of this decade's five female marks were set by teenagers at the Chinese National Games, where tough drug testing is politically impossible. (The 1997 Games in Shanghai were such a bacchanal of doping that all 24 women's weightlifting records were broken, but weightlifting's governing officials had the guts to refuse to ratify them.) In contrast to the astounding accomplishments by China's fuel-injected women, Chinese men's performances remain mediocre.

Both the East German and the Chinese Communists were almost completely stumped at concocting male champions because the benefits of a given amount of steroids are much greater for women than for men. Since men have on average 10 times more natural testosterone than women, they need dangerously large Ben Johnson - sized doses to make huge improvements, while women can bulk up significantly on smaller, less easily detected amounts. The primitive testing at the 1988 Olympics did catch Benoid.

Rumors also circulated around the female star of those Games, America's Florence Griffith-Joyner. From 1984 to 1987 the lissome Flo-Jo kept finishing second in big races to suspiciously brawny women. After asking Ben Johnson for training advice, she made a magnificent joke out of women's track in 1988, setting records in the 100m and 200m that few had expected to see before the middle of the twenty-first century. Yet, she passed every urinalysis she ever faced and retired just before random drug testing began in 1989.

Why didn't the East German labs synthesize successful women distance runners? Although artificial male hormones are somewhat useful to distance runners (in part because they increase the will to win), sprinters get the biggest bang for their steroid buck. The shorter the race, the more it demands anaerobic power (which steroids boost), while the longer the race, the more it tests aerobic and heat-dispersal capacities.

Doping has not disappeared from track, but runners have responded to better testing by using fewer steroids, and by trying less potent but harder-to-detect drugs like Human Growth Hormone. These new drugs affect the sexes much more equally than Old King Steroid. The decline in steroid use has allowed the natural order to reassert itself: before steroids overwhelmed women's track in the Seventies, black women like Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus dominated sprinting. Today, led by young Marion Jones, who is potentially the Carl Lewis of women's track, black women rule once more. However, white women are still much more heavily represented among the top sprinters than are white men. This could mean that the ethnic gap in natural talent between West Africans and Europeans is smaller among women than men. Or, more likely, doping continues to enhance women's times more than men's. If testing can continue to improve faster than doping, the gender gap would tend to grow even wider.

In conclusion, studying sports' gender gap offers new perspectives on a host of current issues seemingly far removed from athletics, such as women in the military. Ironically, feminists in sports have successfully campaigned for the funding of thousands of sexually segregated female-only teams, while feminists in the media and Congress have compelled the Armed Forces (outside of the defiant Marines) to sexually integrate basic training and many operating units, including some combat teams.

Who's right? Female college coaches have some powerful reasons for believing that co-ed competition (or even co-ed practices)would badly damage their mission of turning girls into strong, take-charge women. For example, they fear that female athletes would inevitably be sexually harassed. Even more distracting than the unwanted sexual advances from male teammates, however, would be the wanted ones. This opinion is based on more than just lesbian jealousy: research on single-sex v. co-ed schools shows that teenage girls are more likely to develop into leaders in all-female groups, whereas in co-ed settings young females tend to compete with each other in coyly deferring to good-looking guys. Yet feminists utterly forget to apply their own hard-earned wisdom to the Armed Forces: on the whole, deploying young women in cramped quarters alongside young fighting men does not make the women into better warriors, it makes them into mothers. For example, the Washington Times reports that for every year a co-ed warship is at sea, the Navy has to airlift out 16 per cent of the female sailors as their pregnancies become advanced.

Reorganizing the military along the lines of the sexually segregated teams found in present-day college sports will do much both to use the potential of women in uniform more fully and to quell the endless sexual brouhahas currently bedeviling our co-ed military. Yet the crucial issue remains: Should women fight? The main justification feminists give for turning the military co-ed is that lack of combat experience unfairly hampers female officers' chances for promotion.

We can again turn for guidance to female coaches. The main reason they favor sexual apartheid on the playing fields is that in open competition males would slaughter females. It seems reasonable to conclude the same would happen on the battlefields. This may sound alarmist. After all, running's gender gap is a rather marginal-sounding 1/8th; surely, many women are faster than the average man, and, by the same logic, many would make better soldiers.

First, though, as economists have long pointed out, competition occurs at the margins: runners don't race against the average Joe, but against other runners. And soldiers fight other soldiers. Second, while the moderate width of track's gender gap is representative of many simple sports that test primarily a single physical skill (the main exceptions are tests of total body strength like shotputting, where the top men are as much as twice as strong as the top women), in free-flowing multidimensional sports like basketball, where many skills must be combined, overall gender gaps tend to be so imposing that after puberty females almost never compete with males. Consider what traits help just in enabling you to dunk a basketball: height, vertical leaping ability, foot speed (to generate horizontal momentum that can be diverted into vertical liftoff), and hand size and strength (to dunk one-handed). Not one of these five individual gender gaps is enormous, but they combine to create a huge difference in results: almost everybody in the NBA can dunk, compared to almost nobody in the WNBA. Basketball, however, is far more than slam and jam. Throw in the need for massiveness and upper body strength in rebounding and defense, wrist strength in jumpshooting, etc., and multiply all these male advantages together, and the resulting gender gap in basketball ability is so vast that despite the WNBA's state-of-the-art marketing, its actual product resembles an all-white high-school boys' game from a few decades ago.

Although the ease of our Gulf War victory encouraged the fantasy that technology has made fighting almost effortless, the chaos of combat will continue to demand a wide diversity of both physical aptitudes (like being able to hump a load of depleted-uranium ammunition) and mental attitudes (like the will to kill) that interact to create a huge gender gap in fighting ability.

While in theory it might be nice if we could accommodate ambitious female officers' need for combat experience by negotiating with our enemies during wars to set up separate all-female battles between our Amazon units and their Amazon units, this is where the analogy with sports finally breaks down: opponents in war don't have to play by the rules -- meaning that our women would inevitably be defeated, captured, raped, and killed. Still, if (as, in effect, so many feminists insist) female officers' right to equal promotion opportunities requires that they be furnished with female cannon fodder, there is one proven formula for narrowing the gender gap so as to give our enlisted women more of a fighting chance. Feminist logic implies that just as our military once imported ex-Nazi rocket scientists, it should now import ex-Communist steroid pushers.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review Inc.
DESCRIPTORS: Athletic ability--Demographic aspects; Sex differences-- Analysis; Women military personnel--Evaluation SPECIAL FEATURES: graph; illustration FILE SEGMENT: MI File 47  

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Review Article: Blacks under the swastika: a research note.

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This article highlights the establishment of a tradition of anti-black racism during the German Imperial and Weimar periods. Also it will show that the tradition was present during the Nazi period. Moreover, anti-black racism probably continued in postwar Germany. The postwar story, however, remains to be researched in detail. Furthermore, this article also serves as an educational tool to enlighten the public, including Holocaust scholars and educators, who are not aware that blacks were victimized under the Nazi regime in Europe.

Why are most people not informed about this subject? One reason probably is the lack of documentation as compared to the abundance of archival and published materials that exist about the plight of other victims of the Holocaust (1933 - 1945). Another explanation is there were relatively few black victims as compared to the millions of Jews and other minority groups who were victimized by the Nazis in Europe. Scant evidence indicates that there were an estimated 55,000 black victims and prisoners of war who were victimized by the Nazis.(1)

Hannah Arendt, a well-known chronicler and a victim of Nazi persecution, states that the seed of totalitarian terror (fascism) were contained within the policies pursued by Europeans in Africa. Her hypothesis became controversial among other historians who believed she had no proof while others either partially or fully concurred offering evidence to support their arguments. Helmut Bley, a well-known historian of SouthWest Africa and a supporter of a prototype-Nazi policy toward people of African descent, argued that pervasive racism animated the German colonial settlers to expropriate the property of some of the African tribes, exploited and enslaved black laborers, legalized a state of lawlessness and pressured the government to sanction genocide against blacks who resisted.(2) Historians like Bley have written about anti-black racism during the Imperial and Weimar periods and a few have touched upon the Nazi period, but no one has attempted to show a tradition of anti-black racism in Germany which extended from 1885 to 1945 and possibly beyond.

THE IMPERIAL AND WEIMAR TRADITION OF ANTI-BLACK RACISM Anti-black racism was not a new phenomenon in Germany. It existed as far back as the eighteenth-century and became much more noticeable during the later part of the nineteenth-century, when the country became a player in the scramble for African territories. German missionaries, the monarchy, settlers, bureaucrats, soldiers and industrialists sanctioned premeditated genocide on some indigenous tribes of South-West Africa and ruthlessly squashed revolts by blacks in other German colonies.(3) Moreover, anti-black racism was learned by the upper and middle classes of Germany from the writings of German social-Democrats who later championed race hygiene. Furthermore, other scholars like Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who selected race as the primary moving force of world history, also were instrumental in convincing Germans that the Aryan race (Nordic Myth) was globally the superior race.(4) Germany, however, was not the only colonial power that forcibly employed forced labor and torture; permitted the continuation of the slave tradition; sanctioned genocide; and spread the morals of Christianity in African societies with the aid of a whip. Belgium, France, England, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and Italy are also responsible for many of the political, economic and social problems experienced by Africans today. German racial prejudices were instigated, inflamed and appeared in German publications in Europe, because blacks rebelled against white authority and injustice.(5) Therefore, a tradition of anti-black racism became entrenched in European society via the colonies prior to Hitler's rise to power and the ensuing Holocaust.

Anti-black racism by the turn of the twentieth-century co-existed with a virulent pre-existing anti-Semitism among some Germans. "Voelkisch" (Pan-German) groups adopted racial ideologies based upon race and pseudo-scientific literature of the times. Anti-Semitic political parties were formed in Germany, because Jews were perceived as economic, religious and liberal political threats. This rather large minority became interwoven into the fabric of German and European societies.(6) On the other hand, anti-black racism was mainly confined to the colonies, except for the anti-black racism found in the Americas, which possibly had an immeasurable effect in Europe and on all the European colonies in Africa.(7)

From 1885 to 1918, blacks residing in German South-West Africa, Togo, the Cameroons and German East Africa experienced genocide, incarceration in concentration camps, starvation, forced labor, deportations, expropriation of property, torture and a mixed marriage law sanctioned by the Reichstag, which prevented the marriages of whites and blacks. Despite the protest of liberals in the Reichstag, overt racism continued to be administered by whites until Germany was forced to surrender its colonies.(8)

White racists, who returned to Germany, probably brought their anti-black racism with them. The German colonists who remained would later play a role in the Nazi Party movement in Africa? Some Germans, who returned to the Fatherland, were affiliated with Pan-German organizations and colonial clubs. These groups already agreed to adopt policies of expansionism into Eastern Europe or Africa either as settlers or economic exploiters, as well as, anti-black racism, anti-Semitism and other extremist policies. Some individuals, mostly associated with these politically right-wing organizations, would later join the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Some of them were as follows: Franz von Epp and Paul Lettow-Vorbeck who served with General Lothar von Trotha during the Herero genocide in German South-West Africa; Wilhelm Ruemann, who also served under von Trotha, became Senior Manager of the Reichskolonialbund; Friederich von Lindequist, Governor in South-West Africa (1905-1907), Vice-President of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, leader of the national cartel designed to appeal to Germans abroad for the purpose of promoting German expansion; Heinrich Schneem, Governor of East Africa (1912-1918), President of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (1931-1933) and President of Deutsche Weltwirtschaftliche Gesellschaft (1931-1942); Theodor Seitz, Governor of the Cameroons (1907-1910) and South-West Africa (1910-1915) and President of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (1920-1930). In addition, Herman Goering and Admiral von Trotha probably were prejudiced against blacks, because of their fathers' experiences in the colonies. White racists, who were former German colonial administrators, police and others easily found a home within the NSDAP.(10) A more detailed study of this important connection still remains to be done.

During the 1920s and 30s, the loss of German colonies was lamented by wealthy conservatives like Weimar President von Hindenburg. Aristocrats and middle-class liberals and conservatives of colonial clubs pushed for investments in Africa. Highly-prized raw materials like rubber were coveted by German industrialists.(11) However, Hitler's long-range plan before he came to power called for the domination of all Europe. In particular, he foresaw how Eastern European colonies could act as incentives for both the rich and not-so-rich Germans living outside of German borders (Volksdeutsche) and for members of the NSDAP either by resettlement or exploitation. Hitler mainly used the discussions over extending the German sphere of influence into African territories as leverage to gain Central and Eastern European concessions.(12) Hitler, however, was interested in Africa after he conquered Europe. He devised a plan which showed how Africa would be partitioned among Vichy France, Italy, South Africa and Germany.(13) Some Germans, however, never lost sight of entrenching themselves in Africa.

By 1922, all local colonial chapters were under the supervision of the German Colonial Association, an umbrella organization, which held yearly conferences discussing colonial policy, denouncing the Treaty of Versailles and in general maintaining colonial aspirations. Instead of colonialism growing weaker, it became stronger until it was replaced by the Reich Colonial Office under the NSDAP.(14) General von Epp was appointed by Hitler as the Director of the Kolonialpolitisches office of the NSDAP in 1934. He soon resigned because he came into conflict with Hitler, because Hitler initially wanted to colonialize Europe instead of Africa.

Meanwhile, the racial hygiene movement which had developed during the latter part of the nineteenth-century and became popular during the twentieth-century emerged in response to German fears concerning a degeneration of their race. By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, well-known scientists like Doctors Alfred Ploetz, William Schallmayer, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz and Ernst Ruedin had linked Nordic supremacy with race hygiene, approved compulsory sterilizations and generally agreed that socialism did not apply equally to all races of the world. The Nazis credited them with providing the biological foundations for the Nazi racial state.

In 1895, Dr. Ploetz stated that "whites are better adapted to different conditions of the earth, than Negroes and they (whites) are the superior race on the earth." However, he considered European Jews as Aryans and among the cultured races of the world? In 1908, Dr. Eugen Fischer undertook a field expedition to the colony of South-West Africa. His objective was to study the so-called Rehoboth Bastards, who were descendents of Boers and Nama ("Hottentots"). In his published research report he stated that "Negroes, Hottentots . . . . are inferior." However, Fischer advocated protecting them, because they were useful as slaves. Later in his career, he exclaimed that "I do not categorize every Jew as inferior as Negroes and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy (Jews) with whom we have to right."(16) These well-known German scientists probably relegated blacks to the lowest anthropological and social strata within a Nazi racial order while others were passing judgments on Jews and other minority groups. Fischer probably convinced himself that Jews were the immediate threat to the Nazis by their numerical size in comparison to other minority groups in Europe and Germany. Pseudo-scientists under Imperial and Weimar Germany not only devised explanations for the doctrine of racial purity but also provided the moral, ethical and legal explanations to selectively eliminate perceived inferiors. Moreover, Social-Darwinism gained acceptance in Germany and it was applied to more speculative economic, political and social theories.(17)

One example of Social-Darwinism's social application was contained in the NSDAP's platform for 1920, which focused on excluding from German citizenship those who were not of German blood. At best, emigrants were tolerated under the Foreigner Act with the status of guest. In addition the party platform called for preventive measures against further immigration of non-Germans and for forceably repatriating those who emigrated after August 2, 1914. These proposals were primarily aimed at Jews, Gypsies and blacks.(18) On March 12, 1930, NSDAP delegates to the Reichstag proposed that racial mixing with Jews and colored races contributed to the racial deterioration and decomposition of the German Volk, and should be punishable by a jail sentence for racial treason.(19) Fortunately, the legislation was not enacted. The controversy over the Rhineland Bastard issue exacerbated the racial hatred against blacks.

Immediately after World War I, some black soldiers (mainly troops from French African Colonies) occupied the Rhineland (the mineral rich, highly industrialized German territory west of the Rhine River). The presence of black troops on German. soil in visible positions of authority and the presence of interracial couples (black troops, in most cases, married to German white women) were met with increased resentment in Germany. Politically and diplomatically, anti-black sentiments were displayed by German conservatives and liberals alike. The German state described black soldiers as rapists of German women and carriers of venereal and other diseases.

"Rhineland Bastards" actually were the result of interracial relationships between some black and Asian occupation troops with white German females. These children were immediate targets for German racial propaganda. For example, Hitler in Mein Kampf charged that Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with a clear aim of mining the hated white race. By 1927, The Bavarian Ministry of Interior recommended sterilization of Rhineland Bastards, but the suggestion was turned down at the Reich level, because of the demoralizing effects upon the children's mothers.(20)

Not all blacks in Germany, however, were offspring of black occupation soldiers. Prior to and after World War I, some black royalty from the German colonies sent their children to Germany to study. Other blacks also came to Germany to learn a trade or to sell their art work. In addition, blacks who worked for the Imperial German Colonial bureaucracy or the army, were permitted to emigrate to the Fatherland. Moreover, black Jazz musicians and other black entertainers from other countries, like the United States, often performed in Berlin and other large cities in Germany and Europe, because of segregation in the United States.(21)

Other examples of black presence on German soil between the war years could be cited, but nevertheless, some blacks married or had sexual affairs with white German females. Their offspring should not be considered Rhineland Bastards, unless they were the children of black Rhineland occupation forces.

Meanwhile in Africa, blacks suffered under Italian Fascism. An example occurred in 1924. Italian Colonial authorities in Somalia had instituted two new forms of contract labor, because of a labor shortage on state concessions. The first was called the "Teen," which involved a rotating system of service. Each village provided workers for a six month interval. The other was the forced recruitment of workers known as "colonist" to work on the concessions for a renewable four-year period. These colonial contract (colonya) separated families for long periods of time. Workers were mistreated, died, and were coerced by the authorities. The Negro farmers (jerir) suffered the most from these two systems.(22) In addition, African-Americans, who participated in the Spanish Civil War, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, who were also persecuted by the Nazis in Germany, remarked from the United States about their emotions relating to "negro" persecution under the swastika. Accordingly, they concurred that if blacks were as numerous and politically active as the Jews in Europe, then blacks would probably suffer the same fate?

During the 1920s and 30s, Hitler's theory of a "master race" and of inferior "race polluters," at first accepted only by a minority of Germans, soon began to take hold among a German public humiliated, demoralized and devastated after the loss of World War I and amid the political and economic chaos that followed. After its unconditional surrender, Germany struggled to meet heavy reparations payments dictated under the terms of the Versailles Treaty by the victorious-yet-war-torn Allies. Some German citizens saw African colonies as a necessity if Germany was going to snap out of its economic depression.(24)

Meanwhile, a debate, which began in the nineteenth-century, over the most advantageous - European or African colonies - continued. The ultimate victor was Hitler who believed that "Living Space" in Eastern Europe would bring to a halt the flight of Germans to other parts of the world. Colonial clubs were important in the debates, because they either championed the ideologies of settling or exploitation.(25)

NAZI DISCRIMINATION AND PERSECUTION OF BLACKS

In the next few pages, specific examples of Nazi discrimination, persecution and victimization of blacks will be highlighted. These examples will continue to show the uninterrupted tradition of anti-black racism that began in earnest during Germany's African colonial period. Even though Nazi atrocities committed against blacks in Europe does not compare with the atrocities committed against blacks in Africa during the African colonial period, the "seeds" of racial totalitarianism were always present. These examples also reveal no systematic plan or co-ordinated effort to eliminate blacks compared to Nazi plans for the systematic elimination of other minorities in Europe.

BLACK CITIZENSHIP UNDER THE NAZIS

During one of the Colonial club meetings in 1934, a Nazi official recommended that only "Negroes" who served in a military or civil service capacity in the German Colonial Government be considered for citizenship in the Third Reich. He also mentioned that the population of blacks in Germany was small (an estimated 25,000 in 1925) and that most were from the former colonies of the Cameroons and Togo. Most were employed as artisans. However, he advocated that blacks arriving in Germany before and after the war who did not serve in some capacity in the colonial government should be forced out of Germany. Under the Reich Colonial Office, a recommendation was announced for limited citizenship afforded to blacks who were loyal during the Imperial period; however, a policy of expulsion or forced immigration was preferred.(26) For example in 1942, Robert Wagner, Gauleiter of Alsace, announced a policy of expulsions (deportations) from the former French held territory. It included the expulsion of "Negroes and colored hybrids."(27) Moreover, several blacks and their families were forced to leave Germany or suffer the consequences of being sent to a concentration camp. Theophilus Wonja Michael, an artist who lived in Berlin and was a native of Cameroon (Kamerun) died in 1934. Christiana, James, Juliana and Theodor, his relatives, emigrated to France after they were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. Paulette Reed-Anderson in her book surveyed black scholars, musicians and artists in Berlin from 1890-1945. She cited several blacks who emigrated to other countries just prior to the Hitler regime (1933), or who returned to Africa or elsewhere almost immediately after their studies or business in Germany was concluded.(28) These statistics only indicate that blacks were not welcomed in Germany from the Imperial to the Nazi periods.

NAZI RACIAL LEGISLATION THAT AFFECTED BLACKS

The enforcement of the Sterilization Law of 1933 saw many blacks fall prey to this piece of racial legislation. Mixed-marriages of blacks and whites were annulled and forbidden by the Reich and Prussian Ministry of Interior circular of November 26, 1933. A further interpretation of the law recommended blacks as a racially distinctive minority with "alien blood."(29) In 1939, the euthanasia law not only singled out the mentally and physically handicapped, but also it was applied to "Negroes," Jews, Gypsies and others.(30) In addition, applicants for membership in the NSDAP and enlistment into the armed services were asked to certify that neither they had Jewish nor "colored blood."(31)

"RHINELAND BASTARDS"

In 1933, Dr. Hans Macco published a pamphlet entitled "Racial Problems in the Third Reich." Macco advocated the elimination of the "black curse" ("Rhineland Bastards") by sterilization. On April 13, 1933, Herman Goering, Prussian Minister of Interior, ordered a study in Duesseldorf, Cologne, Koblenz and Aachen to provide accurate statistics on "Rhineland Bastards." The material collected was sent to Dr. Wilhelm Abel, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, who after reviewing the data appealed to those "in whose hands it lies to prevent their reproducing." In 1937, hundreds of "Rhineland Bastards" were taken into custody by the Gestapo under secret orders. Ultimately, some world renowned German scientists were instrumental in "Rhineland Bastards" being kidnapped, sterilized and used as experimental guinea pigs.(32)

A report in The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto states that, in 1942, precinct six of the German Gendarmerie had inquired of the chairman of the Jewish Ghetto whether there were any "Negroes" or mulattos in the ghetto. The chairman reported that there were no "Negroes" in the ghetto? Perhaps they were looking for "Rhineland Bastards" who escaped from the Lodz child slave labor camp. Jan Wosczyk, a survivor of the Lodz child labor camp, currently lectures about his experiences. He recalls in 1942 that "there were Russians, Czechs, French, Belgian, Germans, Jews and a few 'Rhineland Bastards' from Germany in the child's camp.(34) Moreover, Robert Proctor in his book Racial Hygiene Medicine Under the Nazis, states:

The secret sterilizations of the Rheinlanbastarde shows that German racial theorists were as concerned with German-African miscengenation as with German-Jewish miscegenation . . . . According to a theory popularized in Nazi circles, the Jew and the Negro were in fact related: the Jew was of an impure race, consisting of a hybrid between the Negro and the oriental.(35)

Next we examine a few documents located in the files of the Russian Secret Military Archives relating to Rhineland Bastards who were rounded up by the Gestapo during a secret operation in 1937. Within the Reich Ministry of Interior files is a Gestapo (Koblenz office) report of May 11, 1937 which states that Caecilie Margareta Borinski, born April 7, 1922, was the offspring of an African American soldier. She was recommended for immediate sterilization. On June 2, 1937, she underwent surgery at Bonn University Women's Clinic. The operation consisted of making two sectional excisions of both ovaries with the remaining parts enclosed in a pocket in the peritoneum. On June 14, 1937, she was discharged and picked up by the Koblenz Youth Office, which was her legal guardian.(36) Therefore, it appears the Gestapo rounded up all blacks no matter the nationality of the father just as long as he was a black occupation soldier stationed in the Rhineland.

In the Reich Ministry of Interior files, Records of the Special Commission I, Wiesbaden, a report by the ministry prepared on June 2, 1937 reveals that Marianne Braun, born May 16, 1925, was the child of an African French soldier, who was stationed in the Rhineland. According to her examination, the commission recommended immediate sterilization, because any descendants of Ms. Braun would retain the colored blood alien to the black race and for that reason propagation by Braun is undesirable. She was admitted to the Frankfurt am Main State Hospital on June 3, 1937 for sterilization?

AFRICAN-GERMANS

Germans of the Weimar and Nazi periods made a distinction between Rhineland Bastards and African-Germans, hence the division in this article. Today, they are all African-Germans by definition. African-Germans, after completion of their mandatory educations, were ostracized from National Socialist (NS) Society. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking employment, welfare, housing, health care and other citizenship entitlements. They were not allowed to pursue higher educations. Their destinies were pre-determined by the color of their skin. Let us now examine cases relating to the experiences of African-Germans.

In 1936, a local German Community Conference (Deutscher Gemeindetag) official from Koenigsberg sought advice and guidance from other Conference officials and from the main office in Berlin about how he should resolve the case of Tom (last name unknown), an African-German of fifteen years. According to the official, Tom was unable to get a job and measures to find work for the young man were useless, because of racial discrimination practiced by employers. He concluded that "Tom was driven to a life of crime" in order to survive. In 1939, the official finally received a reply from the main office, which contained an opinion from the Prussian Minister of Interior. The attachment told him to handle the situation at his level, because of insignificant number of blacks did not warrant official laws or guidelines. Moreover, other correspondence found in the German Community Conference files contain similar guidance to other offices.

On December 2, 1941, a director of a sanitorium in Leipzig reported to the main office in Berlin that a four-year-old "negro" female was in his institution. He requested immediate guidance from Berlin. The main office responded by saying that "existing offspring of mixed-marriages must go before a special commission (perhaps the Special Genetic Health Board that decided euthanasia cases)." Berlin also mentioned that these children were not eligible for care like any other person in regular sanitoriums. Berlin concluded by stating that "since no social institution showed any interest in caring for the "negro," there remains only to keep her there until she can be placed with a mix-race couple.(38) In 1941, it would have been extremely difficult to find a mix-marriage couple. So far, no other records have been located to determine the fate of this nameless child.

According to a Reich Ministry of Interior memorandum to the Reich Committee for the Scientific Inventory of Inherited and Predispositional Serious Illnesses, dated June 30, 1941, Ingeborg Fiedler, born July 28, 1922, became impregnated by a descendant of an African Hungarian Gypsy. According to the opinion of the Race Hygiene Research Office of the Reichs Health office in Berlin, they recommended inducing an abortion for racial reasons.(39)

Other African-Germans were members of an entertainment troop know as the Deutsche Afrika-Schau (German-African Show). From 1939 to 1943, these black entertainers and their families humbled themselves before all white audiences. Most were dressed to represent a "backward culture", which was no match for the high-tech aryans. However, the Nazis used them as an example of good treatment compared to mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, who were being lynched. When the United States would object to Germany's treatment of the Jews, Nazis would answer American criticisms by calling attention to United States anti-black racism particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Moreover, some Nazis were concerned, at least for awhile, that blacks walking around free would only lead to sexual misbehavior. Therefore, an ordinance was enacted in 1940 by the Nazis in Niederdonau to establish a curfew for blacks. However, this was rescinded because the Nazis still had plans for the reconquest of Africa and were attempting to be cautious for fear that letters from blacks to family members in Africa may contain adverse information about the way they were being treated by Nazis in Germany, Austria, etc.(40) As of 1943, the fate of members of the show was still undetermined.

The Nazi Central Bureaucracy passed the fates of its blacks onto local bureaucrats, who were very eager in most cases, to comply with NS-racial doctrine by getting rid of its undesirables. Blacks who resisted were prime targets for elimination.

BLACK RESISTANCE TO THE NS-MOVEMENT

Like many Africans who resisted oppression under German Colonial rule, Hilarius (Lad) Gilges, a dancer and an African-German, became one of the first victims of Nazi racism. Gilges was a member of the KJVD (German Communist Youth Organization) in 1926. As a performer he founded the leftist actors' group "Nordwest Ran" that organized anti-Nazi demonstrations. In 1931 during a labor demonstration, he was arrested and imprisoned for a year. After his release, he continued agitating the Nazis. He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo on June 20, 1933. The next day, his body was found under a bridge in Duesseldorf. The killers were members of the SS.(41) As of 1986, his surviving daughter still received reparations payments from the German Government.

Evidence indicates that Gilges was murdered because he was black and not because he was a communist. White communists and social democrats (including Jews) were being incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps and not necessarily being killed for political reasons. Furthermore, blacks at the 1936 World Olympic Games had been defiant.

Black athletes like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Ralph Metcaff, to name a few, defied German racist propaganda by giving outstanding performances against Aryan competitors in the 1936 World Olympics in Berlin? They revealed NS-racism for what it was lies and contradictions. Meanwhile, blacks were of interest to Nazi race scientists.

INVOLUNTARY MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS PERFORMED ON BLACKS

One of the most renowned believers in science as an alternative to untrustworthy religions was Adolf Hitler.(43) One of Hitler's scientific minds behind the promotion of a racial state was Eugen Fischer, an anthropologist, who served as the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin-Dahlem from 1927 to 1942 and as a judge on the "Superior Genetic Health Court."(44) Fischer's research institute during the Nazi regime was engaged in several activities. In 1936, a meeting of the board of directors of the institute listed as some of their research activities: collecting and classifying human skulls from Africa; training SS doctors; studies in race-crossing and other projects. This institution no doubt required a large budget, but it was one of several engaged in the study of race hygiene.(45) Fischer and colleagues and students experimented on blacks for a special purpose.

On July 20, 1942, Dr. Ernst Grawitz, SS Chief Physician, reported to Heinrich Himmler that racial blood testing had been performed by another doctor named Fischer on serums of "whites and blacks" in 1938. Moreover, Fischer had performed the same tests on Gypsies and scheduled similar tests for Jewish inmates at Sachsenhausen in 1942. Grawitz also mentioned that Dr. Horneck, another SS physician who had performed tests on "negro" prisoners of war in France, also achieved similar results? Seemingly, the experiments related to whites adapting to tropical environments.

In 1945, Dr. Ernst Rodenwaldt, former Director of the Institute for Tropical Disease in Berlin in 1940 and an expert in the field of the "Negermischlinge" (half-caste) in the German colony of Togo, reported to U.S. Army Intelligence personnel that there was a "Negro" prisoner of war (POW) camp located in the vicinity of Stargard, where medical experiments were performed on the POWs. These experiments and the data gathered were used to prepare German officials who were selected to work in the tropics. Some of these officials were prepared to go to the Cameroons. The military organization and the medical installations for the German Occupation Troops were such that each company had special equipment and a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases and chemicals.(47) The information gleaned from these records shows us a glimpse of the Nazi plan for the conquest of "Mittelafrika."

Hitler's interest in the Cameroons was economic. On May 18, 1936 in Berlin, William C. Bullit, American Ambassador to France, met with Constantin Freiherr von Neurath, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, who indicated that "there were certain colonies which might be most useful (economically) notably the Cameroons. Germany would attempt to obtain the Cameroons, but would not push seriously other colonial claims for the present.(48) The "Mittelafrika" plan called for the exploitation of Africa's resources to economically bolster Nazi Germany. In order to accomplish Nazi goals, they planned to reconquer the German colonies including the Cameroons as well as other African territories, resettle, enslave and expropriate the property of blacks, form a police state under Heinrich Himmler's direction and implement the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 adapted for colonial conditions.(49) These measures are very similar to the systematic steps taken to resolve the "Jewish Question" in Europe. Of course the "Jewish Question" took priority over everything, because of Hitler's desire to conquer Central and Eastern Europe and his intense hatred of the Jews.(50) Like the Jews, Gypsies and others, blacks were imprisoned in internment camps.

BLACKS INCARCERATED IN INTERNMENT CAMPS

On April 14, 1942, Josef John Nassey, a mulatto artist born in Surinam (Dutch Guiana) was arrested and incarcerated in Beverloo prison and transit camp in Belgium. In November 1942, he was transferred to Internment Camp Lager (Ilag) VII at Laufen, Germany. The camp population consisted of fifty Jews, twelve males of African descent, and an assortment of white Americans and British nationals. Despite the common predicaments of black and white prisoners, the two groups were racially segregated in separate barracks.(51)

Valaida Snow, an African-American female entertainer, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She learned how to play the trumpet and banjo and other instruments. By the 1920s and 30s, she performed with such notables as Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. She also made films and records. In 1941 while on tour in Denmark, she was arrested and imprisoned in Wester-faegle internment camp where she was allegedly tortured. Moreover, Walter Briggs, another African American musician, was incarcerated in St. Denis internment camp in France.(52)

BLACKS IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

According to a Norwegian survivor of Grini concentration camp near Oslo, Norway a nameless "negro" from South Africa entered the camp with him in 1943. He also stated that the camp commandant was surprised to see a Norwegian "negro."(53)

Jean (Johnny) Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian-Creole, was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris. Survivor testimonies from the Rottleberode concentration camp stated that Nicolas attended to the physical maladies of Jewish slave laborers and provided them with excuse forms to be used as an excuse not to report for the work details. After the camps' evacuation in April 1945, Nicolas disappeared from history.(54)

A Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) investigation of the Gardelegen massacre discovered a nameless "negro" corpse lying inside a barn near a door. The victim was shot in the side of the head and the body was partially burned. Many of the inmates killed at Gardelegen were from Dora-Mittelbau and from other camps.(55) But the nameless corpse was identified as being an African French soldier who was evacuated from Hannover-Stoecken, a subcamp of Neuengamme.(56)

Toward the end of April 1945, two nameless "Negroes" were evacuated from Ploemnitz (Leau) a subcamp of Buchenwald. During the march-on-foot, they were shot by SS guards, because they were too weak to keep up.(57) Meanwhile, Ludwik Zuk-Skarszewski, a Polish Jew and survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau, was asked to form a "lagerkapelle" (orchestra) at Berlin-Falkensee concentration camp, in which there were musicians of worldwide renown as well as "Negroes and mulattoes."(58)

On June 1, 1945, the 21st Army Group submitted a report to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which stated that "Negroes" were used as slave laborers at Neuengamme concentration camp? Moreover, FA (she requested her name not be used) was born on June 6, 1929, in the Rhineland to a person of African descent. In 1937, she allegedly was sterilized along with other Rhineland Bastards. However, FA was not the offspring of an African-French colonial soldier; however, she claims to be the daughter of a Liberian diplomat who resided in the Rhineland. In 1942, She was incarcerated in Neuengamme.(60) Furthermore, Isadore Alpha, a citizen from Martinique and Summer Waldron Jackson, a United States citizen, are just some of the black victims who died at Neuengamme.(61) Other blacks were reportedly seen at Stutthof, Mauthausen, Ravensbrueck and Dachau.

In 1943, a Dutch mulatto was sent to Bromberg, a subcamp of Stutthof, in Danzig. He was liberated by the Red Army. Meanwhile in 1940, Lionel Romney, an African American Merchant Marine seaman, was captured by the Italians after the S.S. Makis was sunk on June 7, 1940. He was eventually sent to Mauthausen in Austria? In 1944, Michelle Maillet, a female domestic from Martinique living in France was deported along with her two mulatto children to Ravensbrueck. She survived, but her children died? She was sent to the camp probably for race defilement since the father of her children was a white French male. On April 29, 1945, Dachau was liberated by divisions of the 7th U.S. Army. During the liberation, an unidentified American soldier took a photograph of Jean (Johnny) Voste, an African Belgian, who was an inmate of the camp. Voste was born in the Belgian Congo of a Belgian mother? Furthermore, other blacks were incarcerated in Nazi prisons.

BLACKS IN NAZI PRISONS

Wilhelm Ruhl, a Gestapo guard at the infamous Butzbach prison, witnessed African-French civilians and prisoners of war and Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, an African American airman who was a prisoner of war, incarcerated in this facility in March 1945. Ruhl accused other Gestapo guards of deliberately executing some of the prisoners of African descent and burying their bodies in a bomb crater near the prison.(66) Meanwhile, a Haitian national was able to save her niece from the infamous Pawiak Prison in Poland? While the treatment of blacks was discriminatory, brutal and harsh in internment and concentration camps and prisons, evidence indicates that black Allied prisoners of war fared no better compared to black civilians.

THE MURDER AND MISTREATMENT OF BLACK POWS OTHER THAN AFRICAN-AMERICANS

In 1940, Ernst Heming Hardenberg, a member of the SS since 1933 and a physician assigned to the 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Das Reich" during the French Campaign, was tried by an SS court for failure to shoot a wounded African-French prisoner of war. He was acquired of the charges, but the court recommended his removal from the SS. Heinrich Himmler issued the order removing him?

On June 17, 1940, in an obscure French village near Lyons, France, African-French colonial troops assigned to the 25th Infantry Regiment were deployed against German SS Panzer Divisions. After the battle, which lasted five hours, the remaining 212 survivors of African-French defenders were lined up and executed.

In 1940-1941, some African-French soldiers, who were captured, were used as slave laborers in Front-Stalags in France and as Organization Todt laborers in Belgium. Approximately 50% of the African-French colonial soldiers died of starvation and mistreatment? Meanwhile, Gauleiter Holz of Belgium had ordered "no prisoners of war would be captured," and his Volkssturm commander stated "kill all colored prisoners on sight, because they stink."(70) Moreover, African-American POWs were also mistreated and murdered by the Nazis.

THE MURDER AND MISTREATMENT OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN POWS

In 1992, an article published by this journal told the several incidents of mistreatment and murder of African-American POWs by German Nationals. There were thirty-one war crimes cases investigated by the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General, European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army (ETOUSA), War Crimes Branch, alleging mistreatment and/or murder of African-American airmen or soldiers by German nationals. All cases indicated that the SS or Gestapo, the racial enforcers of the Nazis, committed the crimes.(71)

HIMMLER'S 11th HOUR RACIAL DEMAND

By April 18, 1945, the military and political situations in Nazi Germany had grown steadily worse. Himmler was willing to trade concentration camp inmate lives for promises by the Allies to treat his SS like normal prisoners of war and, as part of the negotiations, "no negro occupation forces (would) be stationed in Germany after World War II."(72) Himmler no doubt remembered the controversy pertaining to black occupation troops after World War I, but he was also a German who still believed that blacks would continue to taint "German Blood."

Under the Nazi regime, there was no master plan to eliminate people of African descent, because their miniscule number was no immediate threat like the Jews and Gypsies; even though German law declared them a minority with "alien blood." The exceptions to the rule were the hundreds of Rhineland Bastards from the Rhineland who were rounded up by the Gestapo. However, blacks were pariahs in the Nazi system. They were persecuted and discriminated against. No special identification patches were necessary, because their racial identity was obvious. Black internees were denied their freedom and they were segregated. As prisoners, concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war, blacks experienced varying degrees of racism. Most encounters with devout Nazi racists like the Gestapo and SS resulted in harsh mistreatment and/or murder.

As historians, we must continue to enlighten, direct and encourage future scholars to search for the forgotten or little-known in history mainly using archival sources; otherwise, historical reality is replaced by myths and distortions presented out of context. Today, the truth is still at risk for future generations if prophets of lies, ignorance and sensationalism, which come from all races, creeds and colors, are not deterred. Other historians are invited to join this search, because there is a need to more systematically consider the lineages between anti-Semitism and anti-black racism.

NOTES

1 Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, (Portsmouth, 1991), 96-7 and 167-8; Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene Medicine Under the Nazis, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988), 114; Beno Mueller-Hill, trans., George R. Frazier, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Germany, 1933- 1945, (Oxford, 1988), 10-12; and Katharine Oguntoye et al., Farbe Bekennen, (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 75-6. These monographs provide some measurable statistics on black victims under the Nazis.

2 L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914, (Stanford, 1977), 216-238 with appendices A-C.

3 Paulette Reed-Anderson, Eine Geschichte Von Mehr Als 100 Jahren Die Anfaenge der Afrikanischen Diaspora in Berlin, (Berlin, 1995), 49; Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire, (Chapel Hill, 1978), 233; and L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 216-238.

4 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 114.

5 L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 216-238.

6 Woodruff D. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 155-59 and 233.

7 Robert W. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 11-13 and Paulette Reed-Anderson, African Diaspora in Berlin, 8-13.

8 L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 217-238.

9 Heinrich-Georg Hubrich and Henning Melber, Namibia Geschichte und Gegenwart Zur Frage der Dokolonisation einer Siedlerkolonie, (Bonn, 1977), 77-80.

10 L.H. Gann et. all., The Rulers, 217-238.

11 Woodruff D. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 233 and L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 230.

12 Norman Cameron, trans., R.H. Stevens, Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944, (New York, 1953), 20-1 and 501

13 Alexandre Kum'a Ndumbe III, Hitler Voulait L' Afrique Les Plans Secute pour une Afrique Fascite, 1933-1945, (New York, 1981), 1-372 and A Memorandum of a Conversation with Constatin von Neurath written by William C. Bullit, American Ambassador to France, May 18, 1936, National Archives War Crimes Collection, Record Group 238, L-50, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

14 Woodruff D. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 233.

15 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 10-45.

16 Christian Pross and Goetz Aly, The Value of Human Being: Medicine in Germany, 1918-1945, (Berlin, 1991), 98-9; Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945, (Cambridge, England, 1991), 129-130; Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science, 10-2, 30 and 138; and Keith L. Nelson, "The Black Horror on the Rhine: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy", Journal of Modern History, 41 (December, 1970), 606-627.

17 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 10-45.

18 Lecture (on audio tape) with manuscript given by Annagret Ehmann, dated December 5, 1993, "The Role of the So-called Mischlinge Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy, Unpublished", Record Group 1, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Institutional Records, Washington, D.C.

19 Henry P. David et al., "Abortions and Eugenics in Nazi Germany", Population and Development Review, 14 (March 1988), 85.

20 Michael Burleigh et al., The Racial State, 116 and 128-130; Christian Pross et al., The Value, 98-9; Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science, 10-2, 30 and 138; and Keith L. Nelson "The Black Horror", 606627.

21 Paulette Reed-Anderson, African Diaspora in Berlin, 10-48.

22 Lee V. Cassanelli, eds., Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, "The End of Slavery in Italian Somalia; Liberty an the Control of Labor", The End of Slavery in Africa, (Madison, 1988), 325.

23 Peter N. Carrol, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, (Stanford, 1994), 18 and Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, "The German Crisis", The Golden Age: A Journal of Fact, Hope, and Courage, XIV, 347 (January 1993), 210.

24 Woodruff D. Smith, German Colonial Empire, 233 and L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 230.

25 Norman Cameron, Hitler's Conversations, 20-1 and 501.

26 BAK, Minutes of Meeting, January 22, 1934, Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft, 61k01, 591.

27 Sybil Milton, ed., Michael Berenbaum, "German Occupation Policy in Belgium and France", A Mosaic of Victims, (New York, 1990), 80-7.

28 Paulette Reed-Anderson, African Diaspora in Berlin, 45-9.

29 Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Kommentare Zur Deutschen Rassengesetzgebung, (Munich and Berlin, 1936), 55 and 153; Benno Mueler-Hill, Murderous Science, 10-2, 30, 138; and Michael Burleigh et al., The Racial State, 128-130.

30 Christian Pross et al., The Value, 15.

31 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 114.

32 Michael Burleigh et al., The Racial State, 116 and 128-130; Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science, 10-2, 30 and 138; Christian Pross et al., The Value, 98-9 and Keith L. Nelson, "Horror on the Rhine", 606627.

33 Lucian Dobrosczycki, ed., trans., Richard Lorie et al., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, (New Haven, 1984), 274.

34 Clarrisa Henry and Marc Hillel, trans., Eric Mossbacher, Of Pure Blood, (New York, 1990), 172-3.

35 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 114.

36 Report of the Geheime Staatspolizei, Stapo Leitstelle Koblenz (Top Secret) to Reichsministerium des Innern, May 11, 1937, Selected Records from the "Osobyi" Archive in Moscow (now called Collections), Record Group 11, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Instituting Archives, Washington, D.C.

37 Report of the Special Commission I Wiesbaden, June 2, 1937, Selected

Records of the "Osobyi" Archive in Moscow, Record Group 11, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute Archives, Washington, D.C.

38 BAK, R36, 1442: Deutscher Gemedetag, 39-47, 52-3, 60-1 and 102-3.

39 Memorandum from the Reichsministerium des Inhere to the Reichs Committee for the Scientific Inventory of Inherited and Predispositional Serious Illness, June 30, 1941, Selected Records of the "Osobyi" Archive in Moscow, Record Group 11, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute Archives, Washington, D.C.

40 Miscellaneous Correspondence, National Archives, Record Group 242, National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Records of the NSDAP, reel 87.

41 Photograph and biographical sketch of Hilarius Gilges, H. Gilges Collection, Mahn-Gendenkstaate, Duesseldorf.

42 Richard Mandell, The Nazi Olympics, (New York, 1975), 221-32.

43 Allan Bullock, Hitler a Study in Tyranny, (Hammondsworth, 1963), 1-408.

44 Christine Pross et al., The Value, 98-99; Michael Burleigh et al., The Racial State, 129-130; Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science, 10-2; and Keith L. Nelson, "Horror on the Rhine", 606-627.

45 Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 114.

46 Letter from Grawitz to Himmler, National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Record Group 242, series T-175, reel 66, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

47 U.S. 7th Amy's Report on the Interrogations of Drs. Rodennwaldt and Wesch and General Lutkenhaus, April 21, 1945, Records of the Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, Asst. Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), MIS-Y, box 73, SAIC/X/2, National Archives, Record Group 332, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

48 Memorandum of Conversation, May 18, 1936, National Archives War Crimes Collection, Nuremberg Trial Library, NARA Record Group 238, document L-50, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

49 Alexandre Kum'a Ndumbe III, Plan, 1-372 and L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 235.

50 L.H. Gann et al., The Rulers, 231-7 and Norm Cameron et al., Secret Conversations, 61.

51 Monica Rothschild-Boros, The Shadow of the Tower: The Works of Joseph Nassey, 1942-1945, (Irvine, 1989), 7-34.

52 Paulette Reed-Anderson, African Diaspora in Berlin, 48-9.

53 Odd Nansen, trans., Katherine John, From Day to Day, (New York, 1949), 309.

54 Original Buchenwald register for males, book 45, page number 14, 197, National Archives War Crimes Collection, NARA Record Group 238, Archives II, College Park, Maryland, and witness statements of Abraham Stahl, Erhard Richard Brauny, Joseph Fischer, Icek Halicewicz and other miscellaneous correspondence to include nominal lists, index cards, etc., ca. 1943-1945, Records of the Judge Adjutant General, European Theater of Operation (ETO), War Crimes Branch, NARA Record Group 338, file, 000-50-037, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

55 U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographs of an unknown "negro victim" found at the Gardelegen massacres, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) Court of Inquiry on the Gardenelegen massacre, Records of the Judge Advocate General, War Department, War Crimes Branch, NARA Record Group 153, Series 143, file 12-480, Archives II, College Park, Maryland (refer to 000-50-037, RG-338 for cross-reference).

56 Letter from Gardelegen Memorial to author, April 17, 1995, explaining that the black corpse was an African-French, who was evacuated from a Neuengamme subcamp.

57 Interrogations of Johannes Volk, Paul Kather and Dieter von der Burg, First U.S. Army Special Reports, Records of the Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army (ETOUSA), Asst. Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), MIS-Y, NARA Record Group 332, boxes 63 and 66, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

58 Szymon Laks, trans., Chester A. Kisiel, Music of Another World, (Evanston, 1981), 13.

59 Report of the Forward Element of the British 21st Army Group to the United Nations War Crime Commission "Report on the Neuengamme-Hamburg Concentration Camp", Records of the Judge Advocate General, War Department, War Crimes Branch, NARA Record Group 153, Series 143, file 12427, box 266, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

60 Ty Jones Productions, "A Testament of Strength and Courage" (Detroit, 1995), a documentary soon to be released.

61 Neungamme Memorial, Totenbuch Neungamme, (Hamburg, 1966) French, and miscellaneous nationality sections.

62 Katharina Oguntoye et al, Farke, (Frankfurt am Main), 75-6.

63 Mitchell G. Bard, Forgotten Victims, (Oxford, 1994), 65.

64 Michele Maillet, Schwarzer Stem, (Berlin, 1994), 1-254.

65 Photograph of Scan Voste (African-Belgian) taken at Dachau by an unknown liberator, n.d, Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies and biographical sketch of Voste was written by Barbara Distel, Director of the Dachau Memorial Archive and Library.

66 Report of Interrogation of Wilhelm Ruhl, Records of the Judge Advocate General, ETO, War Crimes Branch, file 12-1457, NARA Record Group 338, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

67 Mary Berg and S.L. Shneidermann, eds., Warsaw Ghetto Diary, (New York, 1945), 217.

68 Report of interrogation of Ernst Heming Hardenberg, Records of Headquarters, ETOUSA, Asst. Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), MIS-Y, box 68, NARA Record Group 332, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

69 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 96-7 and 167-8.

70 Interrogation of Joachim Jannek, Records of Headquarters, ETOUSA, Asst. Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2), 6824th Detailed Interrogation Consolidated Report #1033, MIS-Y, box 62, NARA Record Group 332, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

71 Robert W. Kesting, "Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust", Journal of Negro History, LXXVII, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), 30-6.

72 Report of the Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, Forward Reports Board, April 18, 1945, Records of the Foreign Service Post, U.S. State Department, Top Secret Correspondence of the U.S. Political Advisor for Germany, NARA Record Group 84, Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

Robert W. Kestling, recently deceased, was an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Association for the Study of Negro Life and

History Inc.
DESCRIPTORS: Racism--History; Blacks--Race relations; Race discrimination --Germany; Germany--Race relations FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88  

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Review Article: Caryl Phillips: the trauma of 'Broken History.'

TEXT:

CARYL PHILLIPS'S FICTION is about historical transit, about people traveling from birthplace to homeland, or from to homeland places unknown. His subjects flee persecution or search for a sense of belonging, bringing identity and culture with them as they go, or re-creating it-- an act of imagination.

Phillips himself would qualify as one of his own characters. Born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in 1958 and brought to Leeds, England, as an infant, Phillips has dual citizenship. Now, he spends half his time in the U.S.--teaching at Amherst College and living in Manhattan-and the rest in London. "Like a potter's wheel that has suddenly been jammed to a halt," he has written, "West Indians have been flung out into history and tried to make good wherever they have landed:' Meeting PW in Amherst, Mass., sporting a leather jacket and mirrored sunglasses, Phillips conveys an air of bemused surprise that he's somehow landed in a sleepy New England college town.

"Landed" may be the wrong word for Phillips, however, who describes his life as a continual commute between the three cities where he resides. These days, Phillips--whose sixth novel, The Nature of Blood, is just out from Knopf (Forecasts, Mar. 24)--chooses his own uprootedness. "I seem to be able to produce work out of transience," he says, guiding his car with a trace of impatience through the narrow lanes of Amherst. "I enjoy the moving around, and it's feeding my work, even though it's also sort of mitigating against a proper personal life. I have an incredibly tolerant girlfriend."

The lean, athletic Phillips--called "Caz" by acquaintances--has the manner of a popular young prof who's a shoo-in to be voted "best-looking" in the student poll. Settled behind a desk in his office, he speaks with authority about his aims, his themes, his methods. Discussing "questions of colonialism and empire and slavery," Phillips presents himself as a coolly rational sociologist of British history. But when he adds to an explanation of the links between citizenship and race, "I don't look like I belong," emotion rushes into his voice. He speaks as someone still in the middle of a troubled history, trying to make sense of it from the inside. And when he says of his readers, "I want them to think differently about the world at the end of reading a novel of mine than they did at the beginning," he leaves no doubt as to the passion--both intellectual and emotional--he brings to his fiction. A typical Phillips protagonist has led a life marked by discontinuity and the trauma of what the author calls "broken history"

Eva Stern, the young narrator of The Nature of Blood, tells a fractured and retrospective life story that gradually reveals a grim tale of internment in a World War II German concentration camp. But Phillips situates Eva's narrative in a much larger context of European racism. The Nature of Blood audaciously cross-cuts her voice with the story of Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor who marries a Venetian nobleman's daughter, as well as with the history of the persecution of the Jews of the Italian town of Portbuffole in the 15th century. The slim novel offers up a bewildering array of voices. Even Othello's tale is interrupted--by what seems to be the voice of a modern African-American black nationalist, warning the general of Venetian racism and urging, "brother, fly away home." Like members of the black African diaspora, Phillips implies, European Jewry are a people for whom a "home" to which one might fly cannot be taken for granted.

Phillips has written before, in an autobiographical context, of the links between African and Jewish identity. In his award-winning 1987 travel book, The European Tribe (published in the U.S. by Faber & Faber in 1993), he discusses visiting Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam and remembering his thoughts as a child in England when he first read her diary: "If white people could do that to white people, then what the hell would they do to me?" Learning about the Holocaust, he says, "made me realize that the definition of belonging or not belonging in a society was something that went well beyond my own personal preoccupations as a black kid in Britain."

Phillips has been moving toward the topic of his new book ever since. But he is aware that he is treading on sensitive ground in choosing a Jewish victim of the Holocaust as his novel's primary speaker. No less so than African-American descendents of slaves, Jewish Holocaust survivors and their heirs are proprietary over the rights to the narration of their community's tragedy. In these days of identity politics, Phillips's insistence that authorial identity places no restrictions on the fictional or historical imagination, and the clear analogy he draws between the pan-African and Jewish experiences, is bound to raise some hackles. And given the complications of African-American/Jewish relations since the rise to fame of Louis Farrakhan, The Nature of Blood seems a risky move.

"I do know how thorny the area of black-Jewish relations is here," Phillips acknowledges. "I'm beginning to get the idea that I should sort of batten down the hatches and prepare myself. I am an outsider in the U.S., and so I don't feel handcuffed in approaching this subject, and I approach it with perhaps the naivite of the outsider."

When Phillips describes the disillusionment of Caribbean emigres of his parents' generation, he suggests the links between his work and his own personal and family history. Arriving in England in the late 1950s from St. Kitts as loyal British citizens, Phillips explains, his parents experienced racism and unforeseen psychic discontinuities.

Growing up in mostly white working-class neighborhoods in Leeds, Phillips inherited some of those discontinuities, and--after discovering the works of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin on a trip to the U.S.--he determined to chronicle them as a writer. He attended Queens College at Oxford University, where he worked for student theater productions. After a year of living on the dole and writing in Edinburgh, Phillips managed to get a play produced at a prestigious regional theater. After several more plays, he also began writing scripts for British television. and radio, and then published his first novel, The Final Passage, a story about a young Caribbean couple whose emigration to England destroys their marriage, with Faber & Faber in the U.K. in 1985 (and with Penguin in the U.S. in 1990). "I didn't have much of an editorial relationship with Faber at that time--my dramatic agent, Judy Daish, just sent it in and they bought it" Phillips says. Daish has been his agent for dramatic work since Phillips was 21 years old. For the past nine years his literary agent has been Aitken-Stone's Anthony Harwood, whom Phillips first met through Harwood's father, the playwright Ronald Harwood, a client of Daish's.

After stints with Bloomsbury and Viking in the U.K., Phillips is now back with Faber, which is currently buying up his backlist. "My first editor in America was Roger Straus" Phillips explains. "Roger published A State of Independence (1986). Then I left FSG and went to Viking for Higher Ground ( 1989) because I didn't feel I was getting enough of a commercial push. I felt I needed a bigger marketing department, and at that time Viking/Penguin were the first press to be really thinking globally, getting world English rights. Unfortunately, one of the books Viking sucked up in the late '80s was The Satanic Verses, which kind of put them off fiction for a while, I think."

Sonny Mehta's Circle

For the past seven years he has worked with Sonny Mehta at Knopf, an editor whom he describes as a kindred spirit.

"My happiest experience has been with Knopf by a long way. Sonny is a very important person for me in terms of publishing because his world as an editor and as an individual is very similar to mine. He's from India, he's also based in Britain, but he works primarily in the U.S. which is like me: I'm from somewhere else, was grounded in Britain, and now I work here. Sonny's also very important in that he publishes the contemporaries and friends of mine that I've grown up with as a writer--Ishiguru, Michael Ondaatje, Graham Swift. I think in many ways Sonny and I have a shorthand, we understand each other"

"But you see" he adds with characteristically unapologetic self-confidence, "I've never really been edited. I don't hand in a book with questions. I'm basically handing it in, saying, 'Here it is, it's finished, what do you think?'" Phillips's conversational manner has something of that same style. Speaking in well-rounded sentences in a sonorous British accent, he offers his well-considered observations about his work with an air of finality: here's what I'm doing, take it or leave it.

Opening up any one of his novels, the reader immediately confronts a voice--sometimes a voice without a clear context, or a context that is shifting uncontrollably. Phillips's novels to date have focused on both modern Caribbean emigres, and on the 18thand 19th-century slave trade (sometimes within the same novel). Cambridge (Knopf, 1992) tells a story of violence and cruelty on an early 19th-century slave plantation from two points of view: that of a prim English spinster who has traveled to visit the plantation, owned by her father, and of the educated slave named Cambridge, with whose execution the novel ends. Crossing the River (Knopf, 1994), short-listed for a Booker Prize, yokes together four different narratives, spanning two centuries, to tell a disturbing and moving tale of slavery and its aftermath.

Phillips creates fiction out of fragmented narratives, out of alternating viewpoints that don't necessarily reduce to one coherent vision. But the strategies of literary, post-modernism--fractured narratives, shifting points of view, the representation of unstable identities--are something other than formal experimentation for him.

"The structure of the novels, with the different voices, is partly a response to the subject matter" Phillips explains. "The subject of my books tends to be the whole question of broken or diasporan history, of interpretation of personal history and how that relates to the larger official history that's been given. In other words, it's an attempt to reinterpret, and put together, through different voices, a different kind of view of the world, a different history. One of the things I've tried to do with fiction is to try to suggest that there's a great virtue in having roots that come from more than one place. You can make something new out of diverse pieces;'

At a formal level, The Nature of Blood is Phillips's most disjointed novel. Phillips explains that he hopes he has been able to prepare readers for the challenges of this book with his earlier work. "I think the nicest thing another author ever said to me," Phillips comments, "was something Margaret Drabble told me last year'You know, you're doing something that all good writers do--teaching your readers to read you.' I thought that was a wonderful compliment. I guess I hope that with each book people will kind of go, 'Oh, there's this crazy bullshit structure, I know who that is!'"

Phillips wants his readers to understand what it feels like to experience identity, history and narrative as discontinuous-and then, perhaps, to turn those discontinuous pieces into a new whole. The Nature of Blood ultimately insists on a redemptive power in the recognizable identity of a human voice, in the distinctiveness that marks one persons life narrative as uniquely her own. Phillips explains, "I've always thought that you can do anything with fiction as long as you do it boldly, as long as you're not tentative about it, if you don't pussyfoot about. And that's what I wanted to do with The Nature of Blood. I just thought, if the voices are strong enough, arresting enough, then people will work with it, they will understand within a couple of sentences where they are and will remember where they were." He laughs and adds, with fingers crossed, "That was my hope, anyway"

COPYRIGHT 1997 Reed Publishing USA
DESCRIPTORS: Authors, Black--Interviews; English literature--Black authors
NAMED PERSONS: Phillips, Caryl--Interviews
SPECIAL FEATURES: illustration; photograph
FILE SEGMENT: MI File 47  

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Review Article: Conversation with Ghanian filmmaker Kwaw Ansah.

TEXT:

Kwaw Ansah, one of Africa's leading filmmakers, was born in 1941 in Ghana. Ansah's career training has been rich and multifaceted. After studying theater design in London, he went to the United States where he took courses in drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, as well as at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Shortly thereafter, Ansah decided to go to Hollywood, where he studied film production at R.K.O. Studios. Also a dramatist and a musician, Kwaw Ansah has two plays to his credit: The Adoption, produced off-Broadway and then at Columbia University in New York, and Mother's Tears, staged later on in Ghana, where it met with instant popular success. In the early 1970s, Ansah went back to Ghana and set out to put into practice what he had learned abroad. For two years, he worked as production assistant and set designer with the Ghana Film Industry. In 1977, with a few friends, Ansah started his own production company, Film Africa Limited, based in Accra.

Kwaw Ansah's first motion picture, Love Brewed in the African Pot, was released in 1980. It encompasses a number of themes related to one central issue: the clash between indigenous traditions and European influences in pre-independence Ghana (1951). The film won a number of international awards, including the Oumarou Ganda Prize for "a most remarkable direction and production in line with African realities" at the 1981 FESPACO (Panafrican Film Festival of Ouagadougou) held in Burkina Faso. Likewise, Love Brewed in the African Pot was awarded the Jury's Special Silver Peacock Award for Feature Films at the 8th International Film Festival of India, and the UNESCO Film Prize in France in 1985.

Heritage Africa, Ansah's second fiction film, was made in 1988. The following year it received the "Etalon de Yennenga" (First Prize) at the biennial FESPACO. The film had its Canadian premiere at the CELAFI (Celebrating African Identity) Conference, held 7-12 July 1992 in Toronto, Canada, where the following interview was conducted.

Pfaff: Kwaw Ansah, you stated some ten years ago that, as a filmmaker, you were engaged in making films from the perspective of "cultural revitalization." Could you explain what you meant and whether or not you are still making the same type of films?

Ansah: I can't afford not to since, as you well know, the Black Race in general has gone through a long period of cultural deprivation. In today's Ghana, we are still suffering from foreign cultural intrusions and interventions. We, as Black people, have contributed much to world culture, and we still have so much to contribute. Yet, we are being made to feel as if we were coming from nowhere. Thus, let me, Kwaw Ansah, come out to say, "Hey, I think there was something in Africa before the White man came. He brought his Christian God and created saints for us. He brought us heroes to whom we are not related. Where are our heroes? Where are our icons?" If you look around, it is only the Black man's religion which is always considered voodoo and superstition. Yet you cannot, for instance, go out and say anything negative against Christianity or Islam. Many religious evangelists come to Ghana and condemn African beliefs, but we just sit there. And the sort of education we have had tends to make us look down upon ourselves. Because I have had a bit of so-called formal education, I cannot come out and say, "Hey, I believe in the pouring of libation." People look at you and think you are not serious. But if I say that I believe in the Bahai faith, in Krishna, Buddhism, or Christianity, I will have respectability. I think pride in our cultures has to be restored. Our cultures have indeed to be revitalized.

Pfaff: But Ghana is known for its rich cultural past. Haven't Ghanaians kept a number of African religions alive?

Ansah: It is there, you know, and I am happy that there are some remnants of these religions in our culture. However, they are not being given official recognition. For instance, when buildings or factories are inaugurated, few people will ask the traditional priest to come and pour libation. People will call either Roman Catholic or Anglican priests for blessings because this is considered "respectable." People tend to believe that African traditions should be relegated to the villages, to those who don't speak English and have not been to school, which is a tragedy. We are being so marginalized, or we are marginalizing ourselves, to such a point that educated people may feel inferior if they are speaking their mother tongue with a fellow Ghanaian. These Ghanaians have to express themselves in English to command respect and show that they are educated. Yet, an Englishman who would speak a foreign language and not his own would be considered illiterate. This is precisely how I consider most of the people who look down upon their own values and mother tongue.

Pfaff: In other words, your purpose as a filmmaker is to make Africans feel proud of their culture?

Ansah: This is, shall I say, my crusade!

Pfaff: At the CELAFI Conference you have had the opportunity to meet with the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene and a number of filmmakers from the African Diaspora. Are your goals in making films identical? Do you have comparable film styles as independent filmmakers?

Ansah: I don't think we have necessarily comparable film styles, but some of us have similar sociocultural purposes. Nonetheless, other filmmakers from Africa and the African Diaspora have chosen to film anthropological stories, because if they talk a bit about our political history, be it slavery or domination, they might not get funding. This, to me, is not good enough, considering how film has been such a powerful instrument in the dehumanization process of the Black man. I remember, for example, the films from Hollywood we were given to watch when I was a kid. These films showed some Whites and Blacks in the jungle and, you know, Whites always stood out as the heroes. Whites would gun down Blacks, and we African children would all clap. When a White man was gunned down, everybody would be sad. This in itself shows you how powerful the medium of film is. How can we make non-committed films when our very existence as a race is being threatened? We don't even know our villages anymore. We don't know our country anymore. African children going to school are more interested in learning about the stars on Michael Jackson's epaulet than in knowing who the foreign minister of their country is. They don't care to know because film and television media make them feel that all that matters is the showy things happening in the world of entertainment. Their interest is focused on buying records or T-shirts and is being completely diverted to frivolities. These kids are not really sitting down and thinking seriously about their future contribution to society. Some of them will be the leaders of tomorrow, and you already see how they are culturally alienated and being manipulated by the forces that be.

Pfaff: You are a socially-oriented independent director but you worked for a while in the Hollywood film industry. Has the Hollywood experience impacted upon your filmmaking?

Ansah: I stayed for about a year in Hollywood where I was attached to various directors to understudy their way of working. It was training on the job. I was involved in casting, production, and post-production, all of which taught me a great deal. I became aware of the types of gimmicks Hollywood has used to capture us through the film medium. I thus decided to use some of these same gimmicks to draw people into movie theaters, convey a message, and repair the damage done to the image of Blacks on the screen. I realized that certain directors favored particular editing techniques and brief dialogues to enable people to enjoy the story more. Imagery and action speak louder than words. I also learned how not to make a film boring and how to achieve a balance between entertainment and educational strategies. I consider this balance to be very important, and it is an essential part of the film style I try to use. Finally, I believe that films have to be polished to appeal to large audiences.

Pfaff: You have had your own production company for 15 years? How do you produce your films as an independent director?

Ansah: I had to struggle hard for about 10 years in order to make Love Brewed in the African Pot, with an initial budget of $600,000. By the time we finished the film, its cost had reached $800,000. Since we don't have a color laboratory in Ghana, I had to go to London, where I stayed for a year for post-production purposes. Plane fares back and forth between England and Ghana, as well as unforeseen expenses, increased the initial cost. I must also say that when you come from Africa, everybody in London thinks he can rip you off because you don't know all the procedures. So you end up spending twice as much as you normally ought to.

Pfaff: And you keep going to London? What about going to African countries such as Algeria or Morocco? Don't they have color laboratories you could use?

Ansah: They do have color facilities. But I would have a language problem in Algeria and Morocco because I am not conversant in Arabic or French. However, I would have preferred working in America rather than England because the visual grading of the Black man's pigment is always better in the United States than in Britain, where they are not used to shooting a lot of films involving Black people. Once when I had to transfer my negative to Los Angeles for processing, I noticed that there was a vast difference in grading. Yet for me, it is too far to go to California, whereas we have a direct plane link, London/Accra, with the former colonial master.

Pfaff: How do you secure funds for your film projects?

Ansah: I have to go to the bank for loans. My father-in-law was very helpful in that he gave me a house as collateral to borrow money to make Love Brewed in the African Pot. Happily, the film made a profit, and I was able to repay the loan. It took me another five years to secure other bank loans and complete Heritage Africa. But we are struggling, we are still going on.

Pfaff: How much did Heritage Africa cost?

Ansah: About $1.3 million.

Pfaff: Is the present Ghanaian government supportive of cinema?

Ansah: Yes, and the government has been very supportive of my film projects. At one stage during the making of Heritage Africa, I had financial problems in spite of my past performance with the bank. The government stepped in to give me the guarantees and the foreign exchange I needed to get the film out.

Pfaff: I understand that at the time of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana had a good film infrastructure but no color processing labs. Are efforts being made now to secure them?

Ansah: We have made a lot of presentations to try to get color laboratories. And although many African governments are trying hard to help cinema, they have not really come to grips with the importance of the film industry. If we had color facilities in Ghana, the cost of film production could be reduced by about 40%. Consequently, a lot of films would come out, which in turn would generate tax revenues beneficial to the country. We have asked the government to try to get us a foreign grant in order to set up a color processing infrastructure. Proposals have been sent out, and we are hoping that some consideration will be given to them.

Pfaff: Would such foreign grants emanate from an international or a private organization?

Ansah: From a private organization. If the government finds it is inadequate to support this kind of venture, I feel we can always invite outside participation.

Pfaff: But wouldn't outside participation mean control over the final product?

Ansah: This may indeed pose a problem. Yet, while the struggle continues, one is reminded from time to time that you can't have your cake and eat it too. There will come a time when we will be in control of our own affairs, but as we go along, I think a few compromises have to be made here and there.

Pfaff: The main thing is not to sell your soul?

Ansah: That's right.

Pfaff: Ghanaian cinema is not as well known as some other African cinemas, like that of Mali, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, or Burkina Faso. Who are some of Ghana's filmmakers? What films have they made?

Ansah: You have King Ampaw, who made Kukurantumi, a film about emigration from rural to urban areas. The motion picture was sponsored by a film company from Germany, where Ampaw studied film. Then there is Tom Ribeiro, who directed Genesis, Chapter X, a tragic story of adultery, as well as Dede, a film on the adverse consequences of rural migration. Another Ghanaian filmmaker is Ato Yarney, who shot His Majesty's Sergeant, about the racial tensions existing between soldiers of the British Army (an African, an Indian, and an Englishman) as they are fighting in Burma during the Second World War.

Pfaff: Are Ghanaian filmmakers more oriented toward documentaries or fiction film?

Ansah: They prefer fiction films. I think this is because Ghanaians, by nature, like telling stories. I remember that when we were kids and the moon was bright, our grandmother would assemble all the children under a tree and tell us Ananze stories. Ananze is a spider, and the web is symbolic of the entire universe. In these life-related Ananze stories, the spider has to find a way to survive in the web. Ghanaians are really good storytellers, which prepares them for fiction filmmaking rather than documentaries.

Pfaff:. Is the local distribution of Ghanaian films within Ghana enough to generate profits?

Ansah: No. You also have to market your films outside Ghana, as I have been doing with Heritage Africa.

Pfaff: How many movie theaters does Ghana have?

Ansah: I think there are about 50 movie theaters all over the country.

Pfaff: Who owns them?

Ansah: The government owns about eight of them, but most of them are privately owned by Ghanaians. A few cinema houses, however, are owned by Lebanese and Indians.

Pfaff: Which means that Ghana doesn't have a stronghold of foreign distribution monopolies, as occurred in francophone areas of Africa?

Ansah: No, it doesn't.

Pfaff: Are some Ghanaian filmmakers attracted to television, which would be a way to make films without going through the rather difficult process of obtaining bank loans?

Ansah: Local television doesn't pay much. Moreover, TV is a middle-class commodity in Ghana, and Ghanaian filmmakers want their films to be enjoyed across the board by the mass population. But, since the advent of telejectors, directors are increasingly attracted to video production, which has the merit of not being too expensive. Telejectors allow the projection of VHS onto big screens in front of groups of people. These days, our filmmakers are shooting a lot of fiction on video, which explains why major cinema houses now have telejectors alongside the traditional celluloid projectors.

Pfaff: Do you foresee a bright future as far as such video productions are concerned?

Ansah: At least video production has the advantage of allowing filmmakers to be active. It keeps them going and practicing their craft until such time as they can make celluloid films. It's a very good stopgap measure. Yet I still believe that film is film. Videos seen via telejectors lose a great deal in terms of quality. Videos are crisp on small screens, but when blown up on telejectors their grain is a little wishy-washy. Their color becomes so watered down that the effect is not very encouraging. Telejectors might eventually improve, but for the time being, I still consider that film is the thing, especially when you consider that a film has a much longer lifespan than a video.

Pfaff: In other words, video production is good for the filmmaker's practice, good for the shooting of social documentaries, yet you believe it alters the overall quality of the work of art?

Ansah: Yes.

Pfaff: Your latest fiction film, Heritage Africa, will premiere tonight in Canada. What is the film's main theme?

Ansah: Heritage Africa depicts the alienation of Africans from their own values during the colonial era. It is the story of an urbanized, well-educated man who comes from a very humble family. As he becomes educated, he becomes more alienated than if he had not been to school, and everything which is African is no longer good enough for him. Although in Ghana indigenous names have very significant meanings, this man goes as far as changing his. He was called Kwesi Atta Bosomefi. "Kwesi" means a Sunday-born male child, "Atta" means he is a twin, and "Bosomefi" means "an illustrious ancestor is born again." When he goes to school, he feels that the name doesn't sound English enough. In his desire to become as close to the European model as possible, he decides to Anglicize it: "Kwesi" becomes "Quincy," "Atta" becomes "Arthur," and "Bosomefi" becomes "Bosomfield"! He will eventually occupy an important post in the colonial administration but will lose his African values in the process. He succeeds in his mission, but at what price?

Pfaff: African audiences like your films. Do you think Heritage Africa has a universal message which can be appreciated in the US and Canada?

Ansah: Yes, because its images are quite strong, the story is clear and straightforward, and I am sure that most people watching the film are going to identify with it.

Pfaff: Both your films, Love Brewed in the Africa Pot and Heritage Africa, were shot in English, while other contemporary African filmmakers make their films in African vernaculars such as Wolof, Bambara and More. Why this linguistic choice? Can the use of English betray at times the authenticity of the story?

Ansah: In Heritage Africa, the protagonist's mother speaks her African tongue because she also represents Mother Africa. I use English in my film for economic and pragmatic reasons. Unlike Senegal, where Wolof is widely spoken, Ghana has about 12 different languages. Should I choose one of the major languages spoken in the country, I'd be marginalizing the film's potential. I would have to use English subtitles, which to me can be very distracting. Furthermore, I don't think Ghanaians are used to subtitles. They want to sit down and enjoy the film. At least English enables you to cover about 70% of the population in Ghana and allows you to market your film in English-speaking countries.

Pfaff: Is Heritage Africa distributed in England, the US or Canada?

Ansah: The film is distributed in England. It will be launched next fall in Los Angeles at a film festival and subsequently will be distributed by a company based in California.

Pfaff: Would you be interested in having your film distributed on video?

Ansah: I am not quite sure. They put your film on video, everybody copies it, and that's the end of the film!

Pfaff: You have recently produced a full-length feature video entitled Harvest at 17 on teenage pregnancy. Is this a crucial issue in Ghana?

Ansah: It is a crucial and thorny issue now because it involves unprepared single mothers too young to be mothers. This situation has a primarily economic base: some families know very well that their children are indulging in certain activities, but they have to survive, so what can they say?

Pfaff: Are you implying that teenage pregnancy in Ghana is linked to prostitution or financially rewarding affairs?

Ansah: Older men with money seduce young girls, and as long as the money flows, the family will just keep quiet about it and may even encourage it. Harvest at 17 is a fictional story which treats the problem from economic and social standpoints, and also tackles it from the angle of foreign influence, which makes sex glamorous.

Pfaff: Teenage pregnancies largely occur between teenagers in the United States. Could one say that in Ghana teenage pregnancies derive mostly from relationships between teenaged girls and older men?

Ansah: That's right.

Pfaff: And what happens to the children?

Ansah: The children are mostly raised by the girl's family because these older men with money don't come out to own up. If the girls are of school age, they generally continue their schooling.

Pfaff: Was Harvest at 17 commissioned by the Ghanaian government?

Ansah: Yes. It was commissioned by the National Commission on Culture, which is the Ministry of Culture in Ghana. The story was written during a workshop sponsored by the National Commission on Culture. It was then developed into a script by a committee of six people, including Ebenezer Lartey, who wrote the initial story. Harvest at 17 was shot simultaneously in two languages: English and Akan, one of Ghana's major indigenous languages. I must say that the response to this feature-length video has been tremendous in Ghana, where it has been very well-received.

Pfaff: Did you use professional actors, as you usually do?

Ansah: Yes, I did, which is probably due to the fact that I personally studied dramatic art. I also mostly work with professional actors because my films require a lot of rehearsals.

Pfaff: How much did Harvest at 17 cost?

Ansah: $60,000.

Pfaff: Do you plan to distribute it outside Ghana?

Ansah: Yes, because the issue of teenage pregnancy has become universal.

Pfaff: Was Harvest at 17 your first experiment in video production?

Ansah: Yes, it was the first time I shot a video.

Pfaff: And it may not be the last?

Ansah: In fact, I must say that I am itching to shoot a celluloid film again, because its visual qualities surpass those of a video.

Pfaff: You wrote the script of Love Brewed in the African Pot as well as that of Heritage Africa. Will your next film be based on your own story? What will it illustrate?

Ansah: Yes, my forthcoming work will be based on my own script. The film will be about women and will address the issue of infertility in Africa and how it affects marriages. In our countries it is important to have a fertile wife because children mean a lot to us. And in general, grandparents want to see the continuity of their lineage ensured in their lifetime.

Pfaff: How significant is the problem of infertility in African contexts where polygamy is practiced? Wouldn't one think that if a man's wife is not able to have children, he would simply take a second wife?

Ansah: As you know, infertility in a couple does not necessarily come from women. In most cases it is actually the man's fault. Yet in male chauvinistic societies how does a woman say to a man: "Go to the hospital and get a check up"? Male infertility is precisely the issue I want to address in my next motion picture. The script focuses on a woman thought to be barren. One day, however, the woman's belly grows and she assumes she is going to have a baby, only to eventually find out that she has a big fibroid. People around her also think she is pregnant. So after discovering her fate she responds to societal pressures by stealing a baby she pretends is her own. When all of this is found out, she is imprisoned. Later on, as the woman's mental health deteriorates, she is sent to an asylum where she is impregnated by a doctor. Meanwhile the woman's husband gets married again, and his new wife doesn't bear a child. At one point, the new wife confronts him and accuses him of infertility. After undergoing tests, the man realizes he is the one who is sterile. He then goes to the mental home to atone for his guilt but it is too late. All he sees there is a pregnant madwoman behind bars.

Pfaff: And this will be the last shot of the film?

Ansah: That's the last shot.

Pfaff: And a very powerful one! I also find it interesting that you would deal with the theme of insanity already present in Love Brewed in the African Pot, whereas few African directors address this issue. What has pushed you to illustrate the topic of insanity twice in your films?

Ansah: In Africa, insanity is largely generated by social pressures, and I believe that one must heighten awareness of this sort of problem.

Pfaff: What will be the title of your next movie?

Ansah: The present working title is A Woman Abandoned.

Pfaff: Will your film company produce it?

Ansah: This time I don't think I want to go to the bank, because I am still grappling with the last loan I have to pay back. I want to co-produce this motion picture with African and Western countries. The important thing is that the story be told.

Francoise Pfaff, a professor in the Department of Modem Languages and Literatures at Howard University, Washington, DC, has published and lectured on African cinema in the US, Canada, Europe, and Africa.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Indiana University Press
DESCRIPTORS: Motion picture industry--History; Motion picture producers and directors--Interviews; Ghana--Business and industry
NAMED PERSONS: Ansah, Kwaw--Interviews
FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88  

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Review Article: Michele Maillet's 'L'Etoile noire': historian's counter-history and translator's counter-silence.

TEXT:

in which women's perspectives remain marginal.

4. See Aime Cesaire's La Tragedie du Roi Christophe or the character of Delgres in L'Isole soleil and Soufrieres by Daniel Maximin.

5. Since l cannot summarize in a footnote the monumental works of those who work at reconstructing the history of the holocaust, and because I do not pretend either that the "real" debate is elsewhere, far away, in other articles or other libraries, I would like to allude briefly to the way in which the media and intellectuals talked about the famous controversy Lorsque j'ai ete prisonniere, d'abord dans une prison francaise, ensuite dans un camp en Allemagne, j'ai connu des compagnes qui prenaient des notes, et parfois pour I a premiere fois de leur vie. Je preferais consacrer mon energie ades choses plus importantes, ne pas non plus provoquer le sort en encourant des risques supplementaires, sans compter que je savais deja que je n'aurais pas envie de conserver certains souvenirs. Il y a des moments ou l'amnesie semble preferable a tout. (Montferrand 15)

When I was a prisoner, first in a French prison, and later in a camp in Germany, I met women who took notes, sometimes for the first time in their lives. I chose to devote my time to more important things, not to tempt fate by incurring more risks than was necessary, not to mention that I already knew that I would not want to preserve certain memories. Sometimes, amnesia seems more desirable than anything else.

The Ambivalence of "Counter-History"

I could have said that L'Etoile noire is a book about concentration camps. In fact, this is how the novel was first recommended to me. But after reading L'Etoile noire, I wonder if I can produce any literary blurb without being haunted by the remorse of generating precisely the kind of discourse the book seeks to oppose.

If I try to summarize the plot, I end up with a skeletal caricature. The novel takes place during the Second World War. It is the story of a young Martinican black woman, who is employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family, the Dubreuils, when she is arrested, deported, and sent to a death camp where she finally dies. Such a summary may give my readers the almost unformulated impression that they are already familiar with the book, its meaning, and its characters. The linear sequence of events I have just listed (arrest, deportation, imprisonment, and death in a concentration camp), as well as the identity of the characters (Black, Jewish, French and German), already seem to belong to one coherent and familiar history lesson. We may even be consciously or unconsciously wondering, at this point, if L'Etoile noire will turn out to be a rather predictable tale. In retrospect, I remember that I did not rush to the library or to the bookstore to secure the "book on concentration camps" which my friend had recommended. Perhaps, without being aware of it, I felt that I had already read "similar" books.

I was, however, quite conscious of the fact that my anticipated boredom was taboo, even scandalous. Well before asking myself whether the book was worth buying for its "originality," or its specifically "literary" interest, I was aware that such criteria might result in irresponsible value judgements. I knew I needed another critical discourse. Perhaps it is both encouraging and saddening to realize that concentration camp narratives can now be described as a distinct literary genre, or at least as a cultural and historical tradition. On the one hand, such books put an end to a dangerous form of silence, while on the other, there is a risk of devaluing each individual story if one tends to compare it to an implicit narrative model. Perhaps we do not wish to read each testimony as "yet" another piece of evidence in an on-going trial against Nazism for fear of depriving each witness of a point of view. Could it be that the representation of extreme situations becomes banal when, as readers, we understand it as repetition and predictability? Have we replaced what was and could have remained absolute silence (1) with a literary canon, a literary genre which makes each testimony a familiar series of episodes?

It is because I have never ceased to wonder about the literary value of L'Etoile noire while at the same time refusing to adopt such a measuring scale that I would now like to approach this text from one specific angle. My questions could be formulated as follows: first of all, what (desirable or undesirable) relationship do Sidonie's narrative but also Michele Maillet's text as a whole entertain with (official) History? And then, what theories of silence, power, knowledge or identity are explicitly or implicitly promoted or opposed by this novel? Put differently, I asked myself what subject is created as the ideal reader and appropriator of a narrative voice speaking the loss of basic freedom and dignity in a novel set in a very specific historical context.

When I finally read L'Etoile noire, I was not looking for a manual on resistance, but rather for an example or possible model of non-official or "counter-history." I was hoping that L'Etoile noire was not going to celebrate the victory of any power, be it temporary and non-hegemonic. (2) A first paradox or inner tension within the novel attracted my attention: the novel kills its main character and narrator, Sidonie, who dies at Mathausen. Her voice is kept alive however, depriving her Nazi persecutors of the last word. To complicate matters, we have to keep in mind that Sidonie's story is both familiar and exceptional because it is one of the very rare accounts produced by a black female victim of death camps. (3)

I am tempted to analyze the problematic intertwining of defeat and victory, silence and testimony, exemplarity and exception in L'Etoile noire from the vantage point of what has been called "new historicism," and more specifically, in the light of the critique which this theory has elicited. Although it goes without saying that it would be absurd to describe L'Etoile noire as an example of "new historicism" or of any other academic "-ism," an analysis of the ambitions and limitations of new historicism provides a productive theoretical starting point.

In an article entitled "Re-Membering the Deformed Past," Aram Veeser reminds us that "New Historicists" endeavor to recapture narratives repressed by official History, i.e. "the history of victors." Official history is one possible fiction whose characteristic feature is to propose and impose a series of "deformations" the better to exclude oppressed minority groups:

New Historicism thrives precisely on remembering the history of such

deformations. The history of the victors (the only history that has made its way into print) presents itself as strong and whole. New History relates an alternative history, presents transcripts that are not only "hidden" but also crooked, misquoted, gibbous, and defaced. It digs out the powerful anecdotes that incubate within booming triumphalist histories. (Veeser, 4)

In her attempt at reconstituting, reinventing and re-membering the voice of a young Martinican woman who could have remained one of the anonymous victims of Nazi camps, Maillet's gesture is not altogether different from that of New Historicists. It is also to be noted that, in a post-colonialist context, this story departs from one of the most prevalent models of resistance narrative to be found in francophone Caribbean or African literature: Sidonie is not the Rebel turned dictator, she does not fall prey to what I would term a Christophe Complex. (4) But because L'Etoile noire is not the ambivalent success story of a victim metamorphosed into a victorious hero ine

(and potentially new authoritarian leader for the "people"), the novel may be faulted for its defeatist standpoint. From beginning to end, L'Etoile noire remains the story of a helpless victim reduced to absolute powerlessness.

I am not criticizing the novel on the ground that each story should contain a "political lesson" nor am I regretting the virtues of heroic "ecriture engagee." But it seems that an unresolved tension does subsist between the desire to unearth "repressed narratives" (the testimony of "victims" for example) and the "real" or "social" or "ideological" outcome of such archeological fictionality. It may be taken for granted that there is a reason for writing the "story of victims." It may also be safely assumed that such re-formations have in mind the interests of victims rather than the glorification of the official History which contributed to their silencing. This raises the question of the advisability of a strategy emphasizing the powerlessness of those who have "lost" their struggle. Theoretically, what discourse could best serve the interests of those who died at Auschwitz? Is the memory of victims adequately represented (preserved? honored?) by any (Hi)story whatsoever? (5) If one looks to history for "lessons" or "guidance" (stories as pedagogy in Walter Benjamin's sense), is it safe to assume that novels like L'Etoile noire constitute a useful "repertories of schemas of action" (as De Certeau puts it) or some "cultural patrimony" (this time, in Bourdieu's terminology) for individuals who find themselves confronted by comparable sets of circumstances? (6) Could Sidonie impart a form of knowledge that would increase (or decrease) our chances of survival? My concern here is that well-intentioned remedies could turn out to be worse than the original problem. I do not want to dismiss the possibility that I (sometimes, often?) contribute to the oppression I want to oppose by offering a tragic and hopeless plot to potential victims, myself included. Veeser writes that some historical narratives

have insistently highlighted the "atrocities" visited on the lower class bodies, have lovingly detailed the "colonial torture" lavished on the starkly victimized, "broken, hapless underlings" who people New Historicists' prose. Nor can New Historicism, according to Eagleton, offer "resources of hope" to the "Jew, colonial subject, youth peasant and so on," who supply the "mutilated" bodies that are a New Historicist "item de rigueur." (Veeser, 3)

I am quite aware that Veeser's generalization is somewhat problematic and I am sure that New Historicists may be very reluctant to recognize their work as described in the above paragraph. Maillet's novel, however, consciously adopts the victim's point of view and manages to temporarily silence the victors. Veeser's questions are therefore pertinent.

Two implicit accusations are leveled at such stories: they are suspected of obscene or pornographic intentions (tortures are "lovingly detailed") (7) and they simply teach submissiveness and hopelessness ("New Historicism transmits to the subaltern the fatal inability to act" Veeser 4, my emphasis

). In the case of L'Etoile noire, one could wonder for example whether Maillet is indulging in an indecent fascination with the tortures undergone by the characters, or if Sidonie's utter powerlessness to protect her children and herself is likely to demoralize or completely paralyze other survivors or victims.

Such questions in turn raise problems about the legitimacy of a reader's response to "historical" texts. Answering the first part of the accusation requires for example that I bring into play the author's intentionality and I wonder if many readers would insist on putting Maillet's text on trial for that reason. As for the second reservation, the "demoralizing" effect of the story, I wonder if it does not imply a definition of reading to which I do not subscribe. After all, is it possible for a narrative to "transmit" anything to the subaltern, let alone "the fatal inability to act?" What does "transmission" represent in this case? Does a narrative systematically "transmit" waves or information like a radio system does? In order to believe in the possibility of such "transmission," one would have to recognize that texts are endowed with an immense amount of power (a narrative could indeed either paralyze or goad its readers into action). We would have to assume that our reading is a form of enslavement, that interpretation entails no latitude, no uncertainty. A female reader, for example, would have no choice but to treat the characters as projections or mirrors of herself, to model herself upon one of the "historical" characters represented in L'Etoile noire, to identify with the victim's fate and be made desperate by such a tragic blueprint.

I obviously do not assume that such perfect "transmission" is possible, but Veeser's and Eagleton's criticisms suggest that if the triumphalism of official history always at least partially serves the interests of the "oppressors," it does not necessarily follow that (historical) justice will be served by replacing the victor's story with that of the victim. First of all, if the victim's story does manage to get printed, "transmitted" on a large scale, it could be said that it has itself become a new dominant discourse. Perhaps the historical notion of "victors" does not have to be extra-textual and the canon of history might be able to accommodate several successive "victor's histories." More importantly, I cannot rule out the possibility that some readers will interpret the victim's story as an unconscious validation of the victor's ideology. The representation of victimization may constitute the best propaganda for forms of totalitarian power which theoretically justify racial or social systems of exclusion (even the would-be "passivity" of deported Jewish families has been counted against them). L'Etoile noire is not the ideal story of an ideal subaltern. In fact, the reader soon realizes that Sidonie's struggle against Nazism is made up of a succession of ambiguous moments. In the second part of this article, I would like to show that Sidonie often becomes the unwilling accomplice of a form of oppression which she fails to theorize or understand. As a result, her own discourse becomes the tool of her own oppression and that of her own allies. Because Sidonie's discourse can also be seen as a palimpsest of the specific kind of oppression she undergoes, it seems appropriate to follow this trail of ambiguities. Rather than hoping that Sidonie's narrative will provide the long awaited perfect model of counter-history, the story of the Second World War according to Martinican women, I will now analyze how Sidonie is trapped by her own role as a historian and how her political positions make her the instrument of the power which oppresses her.

Sidonie, the Dead Author of Counter-History

As a writer of her own history, Sidonie must situate herself vis-a-vis other discourses which want to provide her with a given identity. Before being turned into a writer by unforeseen circumstances, Sidonie is primarily a reader. In L'Etoile noire, the moleskin notepad on which the traces of her ordeal are inscribed takes the place of another book, a novel she had just begun before being arrested and which, symbolically, had to be left behind, unfinished. Before producing history, Sidonie had consumed history books written by others:

Le livre que j'ai en cours est reste a mon chevet: un roman inspire des amours de Napoleon et Josephine, que ma mere m'a donne avant mon depart, il y a sept ans et que j'ai retrouve recemment. Peut-etre ne le finirai-je jamais. (45)

I left the book I had started on my bedside-table: it was a novel inspired by the love-story between Napoleon and Josephine, which my mother had given me before I left, seven years ago. I had rediscovered it recently. I may never finish it.

The unfinished history book is an adequate emblem of all the ambiguities of History as original text, as model and reservoir of heroes and heroines. For if, indeed, identifying with victims may be demoralizing, suggesting that a dominated group identifies with the values of a dominant group may prove even more destructive. For a Martinican black woman, claiming Josephine's success as "her own" means sharing the historical prestige of a figure born on the same island, but also identifying with "l'imperatrice Josephine des Francais revant tres haut au-dessus de la negraille" as Cesaire puts it in Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal (Cesaire, 10). One wonders what the mother had in mind when she chose such a gift for her daughter, and it soon becomes clear that her selection was by no means innocent. Josephine's (love)-story was indeed meant as a set of instructions, as a model to be followed. The fictional/historical character of the young Martinican woman destined to marry one of her most powerful contemporaries functions as some kind of subliminal echo to the parents' often repeated advice. For it was made clear to Sidonie that when in France, she was supposed to marry a white man:

Mon pere voulait voir l'avenir a sa facon, changer la vie comme il pouvait. L'avenir a sa facon, c'etait sa fille, c'etait moi. Epouse qui tu veux Sidonie, mais ne nous ramene pas un Negre ou un coulis, car tu n'entreras plus ici. (38)

My father insisted on seeing the future his own way, on changing life as much as he could. The future as he saw it was his daughter, myself. "Marry whomever you like, Sidonie, but don't bring us back some Negro or some gook, for you will not set foot in this house again."

When Sidonie is arrested, the German officers only allow her a few seconds to gather her belongings, and at an instant's notice, she must make some decisive choices. For example, she abandons this so-called historical novel which sees History as an exotic love story and she chooses instead to pack a brand-new notebook. I suggest that the decision to trade an already written book for a collection of blank pages coincide with the loss of an entire set of familiar and reassuring identities. Sidonie must give up on her own personal history, to become a blank book herself. When she faces the first blank pages, all the elements of her own fairy tale have already vanished. Yet before the intervention of the German patrol, Sidonie could have drawn a relatively optimistic portrait of herself. At the beginning of the novel, she describes herself as a brilliant student, the privileged member of a respectable light-skinned middle-class family, protected by the powerful Dubreuil family who would have legally adopted her but for her mother's intractable opposition, and who left Martinique with her protectors supposedly to start medical school (40-41). For Sidonie, success was guaranteed by a complex identity with which she was not really in touch.

Sidonie's emergence as a historiographer coincides with the moment when the problematics of identity (of her identity) become unavoidable. For her, the war really begins when a set of circumstances forces her to pay attention to a discourse which had surrounded all along but which she had absolutely refused to heed. This discourse is about the construction of collective and individual identity. At the beginning of the novel, Sidonie cannot imagine why anyone would want to arrest her, but she does recognize a familiar refrain, sentences she has heard before:

Jude, Negerin, tut nichts, selbe Schweinerei! C'est l'un des civils qui a parle. Je devine le sens des mots que je reconnais vaguement: juif, negre, cochon. La meme cochonnerie, la meme engeance. Ce discours, je l'ai deja entendu, vaguement. Je n'y ai jamais prete attention. (14)

Jude, Negerin, tut nichts, selbe Schweinerei! One of the civilians said this. I guess the meaning of the words which I vaguely recognize: Jew, nigger, pig. Same trash, same riff-raff. I already heard that speech, vaguely. But I never paid any attention.

Her lack of "attention," her indifference have already been mentioned several times before her encounter with the milicians. Now, she cannot disregard the implications of such discourse any longer. Sidonie must take a stance vis-a-vis her identity and the construction of identity in general. She can no longer dismiss the fact that others will define her, that everybody is caught in a system which thrives on labels and distinctions. The moment when Sidonie starts writing the notebook coincides with the moment when she discovers that her indifference towards identity politics has to be expressed in the past. About Madame Dubreuil's Jewish identity, she writes: " . . .

pour moi ca restait abstrait. Pour d'autres, ca ne l'etait pas; peut-etre ont-ils ete denonces? Je savais qu'elle etait d'une autre race que la mienne, mais autour de moi je ne rencontrais que des gens d'une autre race que la mienne, alors . . ." "for me, it was always abstract. For others, it was not; Perhaps someone reported them? I knew that she and I did not belong to the same race, but everyone I met belonged to a different race . . ."

(16). For Sidonie, her skin color was ultimate otherness and the rest of the world was undifferentiated. She "knew" she was black: "Mais je n'ai jamais beaucoup pense a ma couleur; question de chance, surement; de circonstances, de temps et d'habitude" "But I never gave much thought to my skin color; probably a matter of luck, of circumstances, of timing and of a way of thinking"

(26). I suggest that Sidonie's narrative is first and foremost a coming to terms with the fact that she cannot deny the importance of how identity is constructed, imposed, and used in a context of extreme violence and domination. Willy nilly, her writing begins as a discovery of identity politics.

In their introduction to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, Abdul JanMohammed and David Lloyd write that "the task of minority discourse in the singular" is "to describe and define the common denominators that link various minority cultures" (JanMohammed, 1). Because these minority sub-cultures always entertain conflictual relationships with the dominant culture, the authors urge different groups to form alliances, to bring their differences together in a form of coalition which would unite differences under the banner of solidarity. In a sense, this is exactly what L'Etoile noire is doing: inviting readers to discover, or re-discover, or know that they "knew" (like Sidonie) that black people from the French Caribbean and French Jews from the metropole had died in the same death camps. But the novel also explores the difficulties and dangers of conceptualizing such alliances: the metaphor of the "common denominator" is both luminous and theoretically difficult to circumscribe. Given the history of western "universalism" and its related glorification of the "Same," the search for "common denominators" is bound to be problematic because it may model itself on reactionary patterns. During the Second World War, the dominant culture was itself looking for common denominators among "minority cultures" the better to oppress them as a united "inferior" group. What Sidonie discovers, for example, is that all the various aspects of her identity are now erased because a dominant discourse has created a monolithic class of "inferior people": "J'appartiens desormais a un groupe indistinct dans lequel Hitler a classe les Juifs, les Tziganes et les Noirs" "I now belong to an undifferentiated group within which Hitler has put Jews, Gypsies and Blacks"

(25).

As a result, in order to oppose the totalitarian power feeding on resemblances, Sidonie is led to claim differences within this supposedly coherent and inferior group. For example, she distinguishes among black people according to their distinct historical and national entities. She refuses to lump together all the black communities who lived in Paris at the beginning of the war:

. . . pour les Allemands, et aussi pour certains Francais--il n'y avait meme aucune difference entre ces musiciens Noirs americains

, les Africains des troupes coloniales francaises, et les Martiniquais, francais, comme mes enfants, depuis des siecles. (25)

. . . for the Germans, and also for some French people, there was no difference between these Afro-American

musicians, the Africans who served in the French colonial army, and Martinicans, who had been French, like my children, for centuries.

Ironically, the list of different Black communities is reminiscent of a passage in Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in which the narrator defines negritude as a community defined by the sharing of similar forms of oppression. Sidonie, a contemporary of the Cahier's narrator, adopts a different, post-negritude strategy. Instead of turning the discourse of indifferentiation against the powerful in an attempt to replace the "same" with "common denominators," she chooses to insist on differences between Martinicans and Africans. In this end of the twentieth century, Sidonie's point of view is perfectly understandable. It has become common place to emphasize the fact that the African diaspora is now split into communities which do not share exactly the same culture, the same history nor the same desires. For a few decades now, Caribbean peoples have been willing to claim their African heritage while insisting that their identity has been shaped by their own history. If I find Sidonie's discourse problematic, it is not because she insists that one should distinguish between Afro-American musicians and Senegalese "tirailleurs" but because she keeps swaying between the discourse of "differences" and the discourse of "common denominators" without being aware that neither theory is inherently enabling or disabling and that dominant voices can use both constructions to oppress minority groups.

Nazi identity politics is itself self-contradictory since in order to form a large, supposedly monolithic group of "inferior" people, in order to erase differences between them, it is necessary to confine each individual within some imaginary territory of identity which is constituted as a difference from other communities. Before being recognized as indifferently inferior, people are first classified as "black," "Jewish," "homosexual," etc. Sidonie, as a narrator, chooses strategies which the text, governed by a logic of its own, cannot really celebrate. This reluctance to embrace identity politics may be one of the most "modern" aspects of L'Etoile noire, in the sense that the narrative, produced in the 1990s, clashes with the logic of the narrator, who belongs to a different historical context. I wonder if L'Etoile noire does not echo some of the theoretical hesitations that productively agitate the fields of cultural and post-colonial studies. In France, in an important theoretical study entitled La Force du prejuge: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, Pierre-Andre Taguieff suggests that it may have become necessary to rethink the opposition between "racism" and "anti-racism" if we are to address the specific types of social conflicts emerging in our contemporary inner cities in the United States or in the French "banlieues" (suburbs). Taguieff meticulously scrutinizes the implications of discourses rounded either on differences or on resemblances between entities and he comes to the conclusion that neither theory is in itself a solution to racial, economic or political conflicts. Maillet's text as a whole points in the same direction by suggesting that Sidonie's world view is never powerful enough to constitute a valid defense against those who oppress her. In a sense, whether she chooses to valorize differences or unity does not make any difference, and the same holds true for those who exercise power in the concentration camp. They can justify their practices just as easily by means of a discourse which seeks to differentiate between groups or by means of theories of amalgamation. Barbarism does not need to be theoretically or ideologically consistent to generate terror, and conversely, a critique of ideology may not suffice to generate visions among the oppressed. Taguieff's last chapter is entitled: "Metapolitique republicaine: universalisme ou barbarie? Universalisme sans barbarie" (Taguieff, 480-92). The author concludes that both the search for common denominators and the celebration of differences may result in specific forms of "barbarism." On the one hand, as "Max Horkheimer notait en 1961: Est barbare l'attitude qui consiste a ne pas traiter a priori un homme comme un particulier, comme une personne, mais a le definir en general et d'abord comme un Allemand, un Negre, un Juif, un etranger ou un Mediterraneen" "Max Horkheimer noted in 1961: 'Barbarism consists in refusing to treat a man like an individual, a person a priori, and in defining him generally and primarily as a German, a Black, a Jew, a foreigner or a Mediterranean'"

. (8) On the other hand, in the wake of recent post-colonialist and feminist studies, it seems at best naive to invoke a reconciliatory form of "humanism" which also partakes in forms of barbarism. As Taguieff puts it:

La barbarie particulariste de la difference et de l'exclusion ne doit pas faire oublier la barbarie universaliste de l'inegalite et de l'uniformisation. (Taguieff, 486)

The particularist barbarisms of difference and exclusion should not make us forget the universalist barbarisms of inequality and uniformisation.

Sidonie's narration seems trapped between and victimized by both forms of "barbarisms." For example, at the very moment when she insists on differentiating between communities of black people (when she does not adopt the "common denominator" strategy), she reintroduces the logic of undifferentiation herself. She blames the Nazis for failing to distinguish between different black communities, but her reason for insisting on difference is not that she wants to celebrate and value new emergent or re-discovered cultures (African, Afro-American or Caribbean people have developed separate cultural identities as a result of historical circumstances) but because she considers that the group to which she belongs is different from difference. As a Martinican woman, "francaise depuis des siecles" "who has been French for centuries"

, she wants to take advantage of the privileges attached to her French nationality. Sadly, as she claims her status as a French citizen, as her discourse veers towards nationalism, she excludes herself from the black community and the coalition of differences invoked earlier, and she denies other black people the rights and status she claims for herself and her children.

Sidonie cannot make good use of the principle of the "common denominator" suggested by JanMohammed and Lloyd as a strategy for minority groups. Her attempts at imposing her own conception and politics of identity (perhaps because they follow a long period of indifference) result in a succession of seemingly haphazard and ill-chosen tactics. Not only is the discourse of differences generated by Sidonie as a response to Nazi undifferentiation powerless and ineffective, it is also a sordid ideological trap which makes her an accessory to her enemies. When Sidonie seeks to differentiate herself from the group which appears to be the specific target of Nazi identity politics, she implicitly sanctions the way in which this group of "Others" is treated. Sidonie's discourse is indifferent to those black peoples which have not been granted French nationality. It also betrays the Dubreuils and it refuses to address the fate of Jewish people as long as they can be described as others. For example, when the German officers burst into her house, unaware that she is trying to avoid the unavoidable, Sidonie "suddenly" hopes that she has discovered a mistake, a crack in a system which she imagines to be logical and rational:

Soudain, je saisis clairement l'absurdite de la situation: une rafle. C'est une rafle, et ils me prennent pour une Juive. Une Juive noire. Et ils se demandent si ca existe. Alors j'ouvre la bouche pour la premiere fois, presque calmement, sure de moi:

--Nicht Jude. Catholique, je suis catholique! (14).

Suddenly I clearly see the absurdity of the situation: a roundup, it's a roundup and they think that I am Jewish. A black Jew. And they are wondering if it exists.

So for the first time, I open my mouth, almost calmly, confidently:

--Nicht Jude. Catholic, I am a catholic!

This naive mistake theory is politically disastrous since, in order to be right, to differentiate herself, Sidonie must side with the enemy and betray whomever identifies (or is identified) as a Jew. My criticism of the "mistake theory" is not a moral judgement on what "real" people do in desperate situations. I am suggesting instead that L'Etoile noire explores and redefines barbarism as the moment when the distinction between strategy and tactic becomes irrelevant. (9) The novel as a whole does not seem to imply that Sidonie temporarily chooses to adopt the enemy's position as a way of winning her own battle: her tactics are ineffective. Most of the time, when she plays the game of identity politics, when she proposes her own version of who she is, her discourse is simply ignored, her own constructions are dismissed as implausible. For example, in the same way as the Nazis will not let her betray the Dubreuils, she will not be allowed to sever the bond between herself and her children. She is willing to declare them "others" to protect them but her fables do not convince the milicians: "Les enfants pas a moi. Ils sont en visite, en vacances. Je ne les connais pas" "The children, not mine. They are visiting, they are on vacation. I don't know them."

(15).

The logic of undifferentiation is not a last resort. It constantly resurfaces in Sidonie's interpretations of the real. She does not hesitate to ascribe labels to whole groups of individuals, refusing to acknowledge differences within the group. For example, whereas the novel as a whole is able to draw a parallel between Jews and blacks, Sidonie does not know how to link her own situation of oppression and that of homosexual prisoners who, like her, have been absorbed into an undifferentiated and "inferior" mass. Sidonie never alludes to the fact that the Nazi regime passed laws to establish discursive and legal resemblances between a "Jew," a "Black," and a "homosexual." In L'Etoile noire, the narrator would have us believe that a "homosexual" is always despicably associated with betrayal and usurped power:

La blockowa du Strafblock est une Tzigane qui a trahi les siens et s'est mise au service des nazis. Pour elle, l'arrivee d'une jeune et jolie fille est une aubaine qui lui permet d'assouvir ses vices. Avoir nommee cette pervertie responsable du block des punies est odieux. Aux souffrances physiques s'ajoutent la honte et l'humiliation. (240)

The blockowa of the Strafblock is a Gypsie who has betrayed her people and is now serving the Nazis. The arrival of a young and pretty girl is a chance to satisfy her vice. It is a disgrace that such a pervert should have been assigned to the disciplinary ward. To physical pain are added shame and humiliation.

This unmitigated example of homophobia is all the more striking as Sidonie's discourse is not systematically tainted with manichean crudeness. Earlier, she has made the ideologically elegant point that one should not confuse Nazi politics and the blockowas (who were often coerced into collaborating: " . . .

nous l'ublions souvent, nos tortionnaires sont elles aussi des prisonnieres" ". . . we often forget that our tormentors are prisoners too"

(187). On the other hand, Sidonie does not make any allusion to those prisoners who were wearing a pink triangle, and the violence of her own discourse reproduces the theories of those who declared homosexuals inferior, evil, sick or damned. In L'Etoile noire, homosexuality is called a "vice," a "perversion," it is a weapon used to oppress the weak. Nothing, in Sidonie's frightening tirade, indicates that she makes a distinction between sexual violence and homosexuality, insinuating that heterosexual rape does not carry its share of "shame and humiliation" or that each and every homosexual relationship is a matter of brutal and violent domination.

It is also obvious, however (and for the reader, the double evidence is generative of tensions) that L'Etoile noire as a whole seeks to include and not to exclude. By documenting the fate of French black West Indians and by adding them to the list of concentration camp victims, the novel functions as a search for "common denominators" as advocated by JanMohammed and Lloyd. But it also invites the reader to remain vigilant and suspicious of what can be done with identity politics. Obviously, it is not enough to decide whether one wants to celebrate "common denominators" or differences within minority groups. L'Etoile noire seems to suggest that any totalitarian power may appropriate both theories to oppress individuals rather than to help them build alliances. Ironically, the text as a whole provides the readers with means of criticizing its main character, who is victimized by her own complicity with the discourse of Nazi power. The narrator alone cannot fight the system which condemns her to death, and in order to exist, L'Etoile noire needs to add another dimension to Sidonie's story, another form of discourse, a complementary narrative strategy, another definition of solidarity.

Suzanne, Interpretation and Silence

In spite of the reservations I have just formulated, L'Etoile noire offers an interesting and viable model of oppositionality, provided I focus not only on the narrator's discourse but also on another specific feature of the novel: the way in which History is produced and strategically transmitted by two different female characters. After exploring the ways in which Sidonie writes her diary as well as the complex mechanisms which allow this narrative to reach its implied narratees, I suggest that L'Etoile Noire is not only an example of "counter-history" but also the product of a collaboration between two women, Sidonie and Suzanne, whose only common denominator is the diary.

Suzanne first appears as a secondary character. The two women met by chance at the beginning of their deportation, they did not know each other, and apparently, they have very little in common. Suzanne is a white woman, a teacher, and we never find out anything else about her. She does stand out among the crowd of other terrified prisoners, however, because she alone chooses to help Sidonie when all solidarity seems to have disappeared due to the extreme suffering undergone by the travelers. Throughout the book, Suzanne remains in the background but she is indispensable to the narrative because both women are responsible for the production of the book as we read it. A little conventional notice inserted at the end of the novel justifies the presence of the manuscript ("C'est ainsi que se termine le petit carnet de Sidonie. L'ecriture, de plus en plus tenue, y est presque illisible. Ce carnet a ete renvoye par les soins d'une codetenue a la mere de Sidonie qui l'a recu apres la guerre" "This is the end of Sidonie's little notebook. Her handwriting gets fainter and fainter to become almost invisible. After the war, Sidonie's mother received the notebook which had been sent back to her by a fellow-prisoner"

). In this third part, I would like to show that although Sidonie is the single narrative voice, Suzanne actively contributes to the notebook because she makes both the transmission and the production of the story possible.

Sidonie is a historian, she needs to formulate a politics of identity. Suzanne on the other hand does not write anything. She remains silent but she protects her friend's narrative and ensures its circulation. She does not seem involved in the problematic definition of "identity" and this characteristic is related to her specific oppositional function, which is to transmit a voice spoken by another woman. For Sidonie, Suzanne remains mysterious because she does not correspond to the categories of identity used to describe other prisoners: "Et Suzanne? Pas juive, pas noire, pas tzigane..." "What about Suzanne? She is not Jewish, she is not Black, she is not a Gypsie"

(140). In a universe codified according to identities, Suzanne does not make sense and Sidonie seems to be wondering what she was accused of. In an insane universe where the label imposed upon the subject by the powerful becomes a matter of life and death, Suzanne remains strangely outside the logic of identity. She is the "maillon entre nous et les autres. Son destin est le notre et celui de tous" "the link between us and the others. Her fate is ours and everyone's"

(53). Suzanne's refusal to belong to that system is indeed perceived as a form of transgression since she is arrested and deported. But unlike other prisoners, she has not been arrested for what she is (or what others says she is) but for what she does and for what she knows: she speaks German perfectly. This is the extent of her "guilt" and not until after her arrival at the camp does she reveal this to Sidonie:

Ils vont venir me chercher. Avec quelques autres, je leur sers d'interprete. Ils ont eu besoin de moi, tout a l'heure, quand tu dormais.

Je ne comprends pas bien ce qu'elle est en train de me raconter:

--J'ai dormi? Tu parles allemand?

--Oui, et c'est pour cela qu'ils m'ont arretee. Pas a cause de ma peau, a cause de ma langue. Ils ont cru que j'etais une espionne . . . Remarque . . . (121)

They are going to come for me. With a few others, I serve as an interpreter. They needed me, a little while ago, while you were asleep.

I am not sure I understand what she is telling me:

--Did I sleep? Can you speak German?

--Yes, and that is why I was arrested. Not because of my skin color, because of my tongue. They thought I was a spy.... Having said this . . .

In Suzanne's case, the system is not content with imposing a supposedly "impure" or "inferior" identity on her. Her mastery of the German language cannot be reduced to some undesirable physical or mental feature. In order to blame Suzanne for her knowledge of German, it becomes necessary to invent a non-identity-centered discourse. According to Nazi logic, if she speaks German, then she must be a spy ready to use German for unspeakable infiltration maneuvers. I would add that she is indeed dangerous for a totalitarian system because her knowledge of languages allows her to control the transmission of meaning between foreign communities. The spy is the other who is mistaken for the same, she who seems at home in a foreign land, she who talks to "foreigners" without them immediately noticing her otherness. Understandably, she represents a serious threat for a system thriving on classifications and hierarchies. In a fascist territory obsessed with inclusion and exclusion, dominated by the concept of "belonging" to the chosen race, the spy must be mercilessly eliminated because she exposes the fragile foundations of identity politics. Suzanne is not arrested because she is (described as) undesirable but because her presence blurs the convenient national(ist) assumptions according to which the French speak French and the Germans speak German. Interestingly, Suzanne neither recognizes nor denies that she is a spy ("Having said this..."). She simply acknowledges that she speaks German fluently, that she knows the enemy's language.

Suzanne's perfect knowledge of the other's language, which makes her so threatening, also puts her in an ambiguous and duplicitous position: like the "common denominator," her knowledge is a double-edged weapon which can easily turn against her. As a spy, Suzanne could have transmitted information to her allies and helped organized networks of resistance by sabotaging German operations. But as a prisoner, Suzanne is now forced to do the same transmission work within the camp: she becomes the accomplice of those who have arrested her, she must relay their orders, translate their words. In a sense, she is now helping them control and police the camp, and her linguistic ability makes the camp a more organized and efficient space, confining her own voice as well.

In L'Etoile noire, Suzanne's capacity for resistance thus seems doubly limited. On the one hand, her knowledge of German is easily recuperated by the Nazis; on the other hand, the fact that she chooses to remain silent, and does not write her own story, does not seem to offer much in the way of possible compensations. But I suggest that even these two characteristics have potentially subversive effects. For example, because Suzanne does not write, she can devote more time and energy to observation and interpretation. She always seems to know more than Sidonie about what is going on in the camp. Her strength consists in being able to anticipate on what will happen to them and to adopt specific strategies to protect her friend, ensuring her survival, and consequently, that of the narrative. Throughout the book, Sidonie is amazed by Suzanne's ability to predict the immediate future:

Suzanne, hier soir, m'a parle. Comment fait-elle pour en savoir toujours plus long que moi? (181)

Last night, Suzanne talked to me. How is it that she always knows more than I do?

Suzanne is a more efficient interpreter. She reads signs that remain invisible for Sidonie. And each successful moment of interpretation allows her to adopt the best possible strategy for a specific problem. For example, when Suzanne, Sidonie and her twins are packed into a bus shortly after their arrest, Suzanne makes a point of not sitting down. She remains standing in the aisle and only later does Sidonie understand that her decision was motivated by foresight. Suzanne has positioned herself in the only place where she can shield the children from other passengers who cannot keep their balance when the bus swerves around a curve. Sidonie wonders: "Comment at-elle devine que les choses allaient se passer ainsi?" "How did she guess it would happen that way?"

(55). When the prisoners arrive at the camp, Suzanne warns Sidonie: "Je crois que nous n'aurons pas de lit ce soir. Nous allons passer la nuit ici" "I think we will not get a bed tonight. We are going to spend the night here"

(129). And once again, Sidonie asks herself: "Comment sait-elle cela?" "How does she know?"

. When another prisoner offers Sidonie some water for Nicaise, her dying child, Suzanne immediately understands that the gesture is not to be interpreted as a gift. She translates the other woman's ambiguous signals, she re-interprets a discourse which Sidonie thought she had understood:

--Wasser, Wasser, agua . . . Eau. Ta fille . . .

Je comprends, elle m'offre de l'eau. J'ai a peine esquisse le geste de tendre le bras vers l'objet si precieux que la main de l'ombre s'est deja repliee, et que celle de Suzanne s'est interposee.

--Non, n'accepte pas.

--Mais Nicaise, Nicaise en a besoin . . .

--Ce sera pire si tu acceptes....

Je ne comprends pas. Je sens un etau de fer se fermer sur l'une de mes chevilles . . .

--Elle va te prendre res chaussures. Sidonie, Sidonie, ne la laisse pas . . . (130)

--Wasset, Wasser, agua . . . Water. Your daughter . . .

I understand, she is giving me some water. l have barely tried to hold out my hand towards the precious object when the ghost's hand withdraws while Suzanne's interferes

--No, don't accept.

--But Nicaise, Nicaise needs it . . .

--It will be worse if you accept . . .

I do not understand. I feel one of my ankles caught in an iron vice.

--She is going to steal your shoes. Sidonie, Sidonie, don't let her....

Suzanne knows that the woman does not intend to give but to trade, that she will only let Sidonie have a little water if she is willing to part with her shoes. Sidonie, obviously, is in no position to make an informed decision because she does not understand the "ghost's" logic.

Suzanne thus takes responsibility for the two women's survival, day by day. She predicts what is about to happen while Sidonie is responsible for giving meaning to the past. Suzanne does not have a story to tell, she is on the side of silence and at first, a reader may legitimately wonder if a subject can be oppositional who does not provide her own representation of "historical events," who does not try to leave a trace in History. One of the original features of L'Etoile noire is the suggestion that such a silent subject does have a role to play. Even if Suzanne is not an author, she can still choose among a number of stories written by others and act at the level of the circulation of the narratives. Suzanne's skills and energy protect Sidonie's writing and they also partake in its distribution. Sidonie's story should of course remain untold and the system insists that writing is forbidden. But Suzanne functions as the guardian of writing: she warns Sidonie when she is unaware of impending danger because she is wrapped up in her diary. She makes sure that other prisoners do not denounce Sidonie, and she also helps her find a safe hiding place for the notebook. Sidonie knows that Suzanne guarantees the possibility of writing: "En general, je ne peux ecrire que lorsque Suzanne fait diversion ou me sert de paravent" "Usually, I can write only when Suzanne creates a distraction and acts as a screen"

(194).

Paradoxically, Suzanne also protects the production of counter-stories by her skillful interruptions. She knows when Sidonie should stop writing in order to be able to keep the story alive in the long term. Sidonie's voice and Suzanne's silence are eminently complementary. Their collaboration could be described as a form of alternance; each takes turn so that different strategies of resistance are foregrounded or backgrounded depending on the context. Their respective positions combine and double as one sophisticated system of opposition. Here is an example of a series of significant "interruptions" which invite the reader to reconsider stereotypical distinctions between action and theory or passive and active resistance.

One of the historically interesting aspects of L'Etoile noire is its echo of Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism. Sidonie's imagination links fascism and colonization in striking visionary parallels between slavery and her present situation. The analogy is not original in itself but the notebook manages to link the resemblances to broader issues about history and education, about writing and the past, about silence and remembrance. In a sense, Sidonie's experience as a black victim of Nazism allows her to write a history of the Caribbean which she had not been able to formulate beforehand. Her counter-history of the concentration camp is intertwined with a counter-history of Martinique. For Sidonie, raised in a middle-class Martinican family before the beginning of the Second World War, slavery was not even part of a narrated past: neither her parents nor the French colonial educational system took the responsibility to write that page of History:

Et je pense a mes parents qui pendant vingt ans m'ont appris, repete, affirme que l'esclavage etait oublie, envole, aboli. Ils allaient jusqu'a faire comme si cela n'avait jamais existe. (27) Les livres d'ecole ne parlaient pas de l'esclavage. Pourquoi? (38)

And l think about my parents, who, for twenty years, taught me, repeated, insisted that slavery was forgotten, gone, abolished. They went as far as acting as though it had never existed. Textbooks never talked about slavery. Why not?

Only after she is deported to Ravensbruck does she discover that she can write the history of slavery, that she "remembers" what it means to be a slave. For Sidonie, being locked up in a train, forced to perform exhausting and humiliating tasks, being tattooed, is not altogether unfamiliar. Another voyage, another time are somehow conjured up: the middle passage, slaves dying of exhaustion in the canefields, slaves being branded upon arrival. As we read Sidonie's story, a series of flashbacks takes us away from the gruesome "reality" of the immediate present, of the concentration camp, of the death of Sidonie's child. Sidonie's voice is protected from incoherence and madness by this possibility to retreat into the "fiction" of a new history, the patient elaboration of her narrative. Sometimes, writing is close to fantasy, to escapism. But Suzanne acts as a safety switch in the sense that she does not allow Sidonie to alienate herself from the present at the expense of her survival. Twice, she interrupts Suzanne's reveries with apparently more basic or more practical concerns: she has found some food, or she has managed to procure some crucial piece of information which requires immediate attention.

The novel thus ascribes each character a very specific role. For instance, when Sidonie's son disappears, the text of her diary suddenly moves away from Ravensbruck and a non-identified narrative voice (the passage is in quotation marks) starts what seems to be an altogether different tale: "...il est quatre heures du matin, les esclaves de Saint-Pierre s'eveillent" "It is four o'clock in the morning. In Saint-Pierre, slaves are waking up"

(118). The allusion to Martinican slaves is no idle digression; the text is rewriting historical connections between a supposedly uncivilized past and our present. And the relationship between slavery and fascism is presented as newly-acquired (self-)knowledge. Writing has taught Sidonie how to both invent and discover her filiations. Suzanne's role however, is to interrupt the potentially dangerous blurring of past and present: "Sidonie, Sidonie! Tiens, j'ai trouve du pain. Et surtout, je sais ou est ton fils" "Sidonie, Sidonie! Look, I have found some bread. And more important, I know where your son is"

(119). A brief, fragile but successful moment of concrete resistance is thus added to Sidonie's narrative. It is to be noted that L'Etoile noire does not tell the reader what Suzanne does. The coherence of Sidonie's narrative voice is maintained until the end even if it means that gaps and untilled holes in the story persist. We never know what Suzanne does while Sidonie sleeps or writes, but we are made to understand that both the woman who writes and the woman who does not write are complementary elements of the same overall strategy. Sidonie herself formulates a theory of "alternance" as an attempt to explain the unstable power structure, the strange shifting of power and strength between Suzanne and herself:

D'ou lui viennent cette energie, cette autorite, cette fermete? Jusqu'a present, il me semblait que des deux, la femme forte, c'etait moi.

Peut-etre est-ce cela le sens de notre rencontre: I'alternance de notre volonte, la diversite de nos forces? (109)

Where does she find such energy, such authority, such assertiveness? Until now, I had the impression that I was the strong woman. Perhaps this is the meaning of our encounter: the alternance of our wills, the diversity of our strengths?

Paradoxically, for the narrative to survive even after the author's death, writing must alternate with other tactics: it is not enough to write a story; it is imperative that the story be protected, transmitted. For instance, Suzanne's last intervention takes the form of another and final interruption: she warns Sidonie that the time has come to stop writing even though the story is not finished, and never will be. Suzanne knows that they are both going to die and that Sidonie must let go of the notebook, allow the information to circulate without her. One last time, Suzanne understands, or "interprets" signs faster than Sidonie does. She guesses or predicts what the enemy's words mean for them:

Je viens d'apprendre que Suzanne et moi allons changer de camp. On nous envoie a Mathausen. C'est la fin me dit Suzanne. Mathausen est un camp d'extermination. Mais les Allemands ne gagneront pas la guerre en Autriche. Nous serons venges. On nous a ordonne de rassembler nos affaires le plus vite possible . . .

(244)

I have just found out that Suzanne and I are going to be transferred to another camp. We are being sent to Mathausen. "It is over," Suzanne tells me "Mathausen is an extermination camp. But the Germans will not win the war in Austria. We will be avenged. We have been told to pack our things as soon as possible . . ."

Neither Sidonie nor Suzanne can survive on their own, neither one can do without the other. Without Sidonie, Suzanne would be a dead body deprived of a story, of a tombstone, of the possibility of being remembered. Her skills as a translator would have been squandered. Conversely, if Suzanne had not been able to predict the immediate future, to find out when and how it is possible to survive, if she had not opted in favor of silence, if she had not been content with transmitting the other's words, including the enemy's orders when she works as an interpreter, then Sidonie's notebook could not have become history. She would not have followed Suzanne's advice to give the precious notebook to Anastasie (a Martinican prisoner whose presence lends verisimilitude to the reappearance of the notebook after the war) her rewriting of history, as well as her sacrifice, would have been in vain.

An optimistic reading of L'Etoile noire suggests that the relationship between Suzanne and Sidonie resembles the difference between a fictional text (which can always be read as a contribution to History) and a critical piece (which can always be seen as a translation, an interpretation, a transmission). Like a critic, Suzanne has limited power over a canon. Like Suzanne (who, after all, is a teacher in L'Etoile noire), a professor in a department of literature takes the responsibility to recommend certain texts and encourage students and colleagues to read them. In much the same way, Suzanne functions like a pedagogue and a historiographer: by helping Sidonie to write her story and by helping her distribute her narrative, she operates a selection which, in the long run, empowers Sidonie's story at the expense of all the narratives to which she did not contribute. Her power is that of the translator who lends her own voice to another author. Even if the translation is never transparent, she allows readers from other countries to have access to a voice which would otherwise remain inaudible. Her mastery of the other's language is a source of subversion even if it condemns her to unavoidable moments of complicity.

Suzanne's role as a silent historian remains problematic and ambiguous, but her collaboration with Sidonie turns L'Etoile noire into a complex exploration of the relationship between failure and success, theory and practice, opposition and fiction. The novel retains the liberatory aspects of counter-histories while addressing some of the concerns expressed by critics like Veeser and Eagleton. Collaboration and alternance, as exemplified by the relationship between Sidonie and Suzanne, provide the elements of an answer to people whose history has been suppressed and also their allies who do not wish to usurp their right to speak for themselves. Speaking for the other may appear like the most logical strategy to those who refuse to contract "natural" alliances with the powers that be. Veeser states, for example, that

To avoid a demoralizing stand-off between New Historicists and postcolonial studies, literary critics will need to adopt the role of the subaltern. The subaltern, a non-commissioned officer--occupies a middling place. (Veeser, 10)

But the desire to "adopt the role of the subaltern" is never innocent since it does not avoid the pitfall of representation: most theorists are painfully aware that if they yield to the temptation of speaking for the victim, what gets told is not the victim's story. (10) One may wonder indeed if there is such a thing as a "non-commissioned officer." For Veeser, the "non-commissioned officer" is comparable to the "factory foreman" who occupies a "middling place" between the workers and the management. But the idea that the go-between will necessarily find him or herself on the "subaltern's" side will probably seem a utopian and unrealistic position to those who have found out the hard way that "metissage" is not always synonymous with economic, political and ideological empowerment. Suzanne never claims the ambiguous title of "subaltern" as some kind of trophy of innocence. She never tries to "adopt" a given identity (she never compares herself to a Jew, a Black or a homosexual), nor does she "adopt" the role of the victim. Her ambiguous status is a demoralizing reminder that, as critics and readers, we may desperately try to speak for the "subaltern" only to find out that it is impossible to strip oneself of one's privileges, including that of being heard, of having a public. Suzanne does not try to be more of a "subaltern" than the system forces her to be: she accepts taking advantage of what she knows in order to infiltrate the camp's structure. Perhaps her position of oppositional duplicity and bilingualism will not be totally unfamiliar to those who work within academic circles and who, at night, are visited by nightmarish regrets of failed activism, of betrayal and complicity. Suzanne does choose an in-between position and she is perfectly aware that this entails a certain amount of impure contact with the enemy. She is a mediator, neither innocent nor glamorous. And the notebook remains signed by Sidonie. (11)

Notes

1. Concentration camp survivors seem to have been confined to two very different forms of silence. The self-imposed "amnesia" mentioned by the main character of Helene de Montferrand's Journal de Suzanne partly explains why the story of what prisoners went through remains unsaid, untold and untellable. To this amnesia was added a generalized form of "deafness" which Jean-Francois Lyotard aptly describes at the beginning of Le Differend. As Sireone Weil puts it: "Des que nous sommes rentres nous avons cherche a parler. Mais nul n'a voulu entendre" "As soon as we came back, we tried to talk but nobody would listen"

("Le retour des deportes," Montreynaud, 343).

2. In my discussion of the relationship between power and history, I will be borrowing from a number of theoretical works whose common feature is the critique of the supposedly transparent printed (official) Histories. The questioning of Historical authority is an interdisciplinary venture which cuts across centuries and geographical areas. I am implicitly referring to the works of Michel Foucault (more specifically Surveiller et Punir), of Deleuze and Guattari (see the "rhizome" reverie in Les mille plateaux), and also of post-colonial critics such as Spivak and Edouard Glissant whose Discours Antillais is particularly relevant to a study of colonized history.

3. Compared with the enormous amount of literature produced by canonical authors during and after the second world war, one finds very few novels about the specific situation of the French West Indies during that period. It would be interesting to compare L'Etoile noire to Raphael Confiant's Le Negre et l'amiral (the title refers to "l'amiral Robert," the representative of the Vichy government in the French Antilles)
COPYRIGHT 1993 Charles H. Rowell
DESCRIPTORS: Concentration camps--Portrayals, depictions, etc.; Diaries-- Portrayals, depictions, etc.; World War, 1939-1945--Portrayals, depictions, etc. FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

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Review article: Political blackness and British Asians.

TEXT:

Introduction

In 1982 Salman Rushdie wrote:

'Britain is now two entirely different worlds and the one you inherit is determined by the colour of your skin' (Rushdie 1982).

He described such a condition as 'the new empire within Britain'. Since then he has come to see himself as battling within a different colour-dualism: this time rallying the forces of light against the forces of darkness (Rushdie 1989), in the process of which he has re-evaluated his view of the British Empire ('we were lucky to be ruled by Britain', (Mortimer 1992:2)).

Others with easier circumstances or more political steadfastness continue to see Britain in terms of the first colour dualism. For most people who have been active in British race relations debates over the last decade or so, whether at political, academic or administrative levels, have participated or acquiesced in the idea that an, perhaps the, important social fact about non-white people in Britain is their common participation in a political 'blackness'. The single most important and common manifestation of this idea has been the use of the term 'black' to describe people of African, Caribbean and South Asian origins in Britain. Sociologists have been both at the forefront of this development, and amongst the slowest to abandon it. At one of the sessions of the 1992 British Sociological Association Annual Conference, in response to a query about terminology the Chair announced, without any consultation, that she was sure that most of those present were in favour of the term 'black' to cover all non-white people, so that is how she wanted the term used.(1) She was probably right about her colleagues (most of whom were of course white like herself), yet the need for such a ruling from the chair is an indication that even within the confines of sociology of race there is growing recognition that the concept of 'black' is in serious trouble.

Yasmin Ali, following the lead of Stuart Hall (1992: 252), has described the fortunes of the concept of 'black' in the following way:

At the beginning of the 1980s 'communities originating in some of the countries of the old empire' would have been expressed unselfconsciously as 'black communities'. At the end of the decade 'black' is a much more contentious label than it was previously. 'Black' in its British usage was intended to convey a sense of a necessary common interest and solidarity between communities from the old empire (or the New Commonwealth); it was a usage predicated on the politics of anti-racism. As such 'black' 'became "hegemonic" over other ethnic/racial identities' in the late seventies and early eighties. The moment was not to last. From within marginalized communities and from without there was, in the 1980s, a steady assault upon this fragile hegemony (Ali 1991: 195).

As one of the people cited as responsible for contributing to the defeat of this hegemony (Ali 1991: 207), I would like to return to this topic to consider an aspect of why this hegemony was so vulnerable to criticism. It is important to be clear, of course, that what has been defeated is not the concept of 'black' but its hegemony, and even then, as far as terminology is concerned, the effect of the change in political writing and academic research is negligible. Hence, while the Commission for Racial Equality in December 1988 ceased to recommend that 'black' as an ethnic monitoring category encompassed Asians (CRE 1988), British academic writing on race has continued with the older terminology. While some explicitly acknowledge that 'black' is a political or ideological term that many of those to whom it refers 'would not accept it as referring to themselves' (e.g. Sarre 1989: 127), increasingly academic writers have been justifying their terminology, though this usually takes no more than a footnote, with the claim that they are merely observing conventional or standard usage from which no politics can be inferred (e.g. Nanton 1989: note 1; Mullings 1992: note 1; Saggar 1992: xii; Smith 1993: note 1).(2) Yet if one compares the 'quality' British newspapers and weeklies and the radio and television current affairs coverage in the years 1984-1988 with the years thereafter one will find, I believe, that in the majority of cases where 'black' was used in the earlier period to mean non-white people, the terminology in the later period is likely to be 'ethnic minorities' or 'black and Asian'. That is to say, that in quality current affairs reportage and discussion the inclusive and political term 'black' comes to the fore in the earlier period and is replaced in the later period by a more specific ethnic usage where 'black' means sub-Saharan African origins or phenotype. I therefore understand the loss of the hegemony of 'black' to mean a pushing back from the mainstream public discourse to its original location, left-wing politics and race sociology, where, of course, it still flourishes.

Because my primary concern is with the kind of current affairs reportage I have referred to, together with the speeches and documents produced by political parties, trades unions, big employers, central and local government officials and professionals and so on (this is what I mean by 'mainstream public discourse'), I would date the hey-day of the concept of 'black' differently from Ali. For her the high-point was the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ali 1991: 201) and others would confine it yet again to the earlier of these two periods when the concept of 'black', devised by New Left radicals to mark a transcendence of ethnicity and origins in favour of a new colour-solidarity and political formation, is said to have been taken up by Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities who found that their separate struggles were actually bringing them together; a moment that was soon to be lost when the concept was appropriated by the set of race professionals that emerged in the local and central government responses to the riots of 1981 (Sivanandan 1985; Gilroy 1989: 25). Yet it was the incorporation of these anti-racist pressures into the British polity that led to the ascendancy of the inclusive concept of 'black' within the mainstream (Banton 1987; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 159). For with the enactment of the 1976 Race Relations Act and particularly with local government racial equality initiatives after the 1981 riots a tranche of radical activists were brought into work with the state, with 'the system' (Dhondy 1987). It was their anti-racist rhetoric, often contradictorily mixed up with the very different 'black is beautiful' rhetoric of ethnic pride, which came together with the more social scientific and administrative language of statistics and policy recommendations, which, too, favoured a white-black tidiness, to create the favoured consensus which was around the term 'black' in early to mid-eighties, first within the specialist lobby and then more widely.

Hence, the important mainstream hegemony came to be established just as the original left-wing, extra-state radicalism and the consequent Afro-Caribbean-Asian solidarities that arose from community self-defence from skinheads or police harassment, were giving way to struggles within the Labour Party and the (local) state in which Afro-Caribbeans and Asians lobbied for ethnic or sub-ethnic interests (usually the distribution of jobs, social grants and control of state-aided community centres and projects) which belied the increasing and uncritical use of the rhetoric of political colour-unity. The contrast, then, between radicals, like Sivanandan, Hall, Gilroy and Ali, dating the hegemonic period as the late 1970s and early 1980s, and my dating it as early to late 1980s is primarily a difference in our respective interests in radicalism and mainstream discourse. For those whose starting-point was extra-state agitation as a way of amplifying and connecting with idealised histories of class struggle and global anti-imperialism could not help but see the transformation of their 'black' movements into 'the race relations industry' and competing ethnic lobbies as, to use Sivanandan's phrase, a 'degradation'. For those like me whose community relations work perspective was, in the period of the 'degradation', increasingly obliged to adopt a 'black' discourse perspective which (as the radicals note) was inconsistent with the emerging ethnic realities, the problem was not about the decline of the concept of 'black', but how such a concept was ever foisted upon the various ethnic minorities.

Why 'Black' Harms Asians

While the concept of 'black' became part of the race relations discourse orthodoxy (even if this concept was a degraded version of earlier radical hopes), such that, as I can personally testify, it became a taboo to question it within certain activist, administrative and, even, research contexts, nevertheless it did attract several different kinds and sources of criticism. Yasmin Ali groups these as 'debates encompassing black cultural politics, anti-racism/multiculturalism, the growth of ethnicism, the laments for England of both the sentimentalist left and the social authoritarian right, and the rhetoric of "popular capitalism"' (1991: 195). My concern here is very specifically focussed. My argument is that whatever strengths and flaws, good and harm, there may be in the hegemony of the concept of 'black', it has at least one critically undesirable aspect: it harms British Asians. I am aware that other groups too claim that it harms them. For example, cultural Africanists reject the term 'black' because they believe it strips members of the African diaspora of their African roots (e.g. Yekawi 1986; Dennis 1989); while in Britain this debate is only gradually reaching beyond poets and artists, it is a recurring topic of debate in the popular London Afro-Caribbean paper, The Voice, and it is interesting to note that parallel debates among black American intellectuals a decade or more ago have now led to the political replacement of the term 'black' in favour of 'African-American' (as before 'black' replaced 'negro' which previously had replaced 'coloured'), (Martin 1991). A more politically fractious example is that of the two African-origin councillors in the London Borough of Brent who, arguing that under cover of 'black', jobs and resources were going to Afro-Caribbeans at the expense of the less numerous and visible Africans, have successfully replaced 'black' as an equality monitoring category in favour of categories of origins such as 'African'. Again, having been persuaded that mixed-race children and teenagers would suffer from low self-esteem and identity confusion if not told they were 'black', social workers are now finding that the majority of such persons reject a exclusivist identity and yet have no special identity problems (Tizard and Pheonix 1993). I offer no comment on these other debates but focus on my single argument, for it is in the case of British Asians that I can speak with some personal authenticity, and it is an argument rarely found at any length in race relations writing.

Given, then, that the origins of 'black' lie in the egalitarian desire of grouping those people together who suffer similar forms of discrimination and marginality, so that their condition can be highlighted and remedial action taken, including ethnic mobilisation, law and policy, how can I argue that 'black' is harmful to Asians? I offer seven reasons below, most of which depend upon the fact that the term 'black' is not neutral amongst non-white ethnic groups. It has a historical and current meaning such that it is powerfully evocative of people of sub-Saharan African origins, and all other groups, if evoked at all, are secondary. It is not an empty term that can be picked up and given a meaning such that any group other than those of African origins can be the core group (just as masculine vocabulary, even when intended to be gender-neutral, as in legal and academic language, cannot but put the image of the male gender in the reader's mind). Some of the negative effects for Asians, in extending an Afro-based term to describe Asians are as follows (for a related viewpoint, see Hazareesingh 1986).

Doublespeak

Asians are sometimes 'black' and sometimes not depending not upon the Asians in question (i.e. upon whether they accept the terminology), but upon the convenience or politics of the speaker or writer. Examples are so commonplace that a report or conference on race in Britain where this did not occur would be most unusual, and I will illustrate my point with two examples. An expert Labour Party committee on racial equality argues:

Too often when the party discusses membership of black and Asian people it centres on the level of public representativeness, magistrates and MPs, rather than on ways in which black people can play a role in the party without necessarily aspiring to hold office; this is not to diminish the important point that many more black people should hold such offices (Labour Party 1985: 20, my italics).

A sentence which boldly begins with one meaning of 'black' immediately gives way to an entirely different meaning without .any suggestion of having done so. Consider also the example of when local authority job advertisements proclaim a desire to attract applications from 'black and ethnic minorities'(3) or 'black and Asian people'. That in each case the second half of these conjunctions is very definitely secondary, an irritating addition, is clear from the fact that regardless of how often these conjunctions are used their order always follows strict precedence. Rare indeed in these contexts would a statement be made in terms of 'all ethnic minorities including black people'. And to expect a phrase such as 'Asian and Black' might not seem unreasonable given the size of the respective populations, or even the convention of alphabetical precedence, let alone the variety normal in the use of language; but it is an expectation which will invariably be disappointed.

It may be thought that these examples, being examples of mere language, are rather trivial and inconsequential. I hope to demonstrate, as I proceed, that this is not so, but at this stage it is important to note the personam point that advocates of the all-inclusive term 'black' cannot make this objection. For they believe no less than I do that the language and imagery of public identity is integrally linked with inequality, discrimination and exclusion on the one hand, and with group pride, mobilisation and liberation on the other hand. Hence the energy they put in opposing some words, e.g., 'coloured' and in advocating their favoured term 'black'. I also call upon the growing consensus for not using exclusively masculine language to describe situations which could equally apply to both genders: if 'men' were substituted for 'black' and 'women' for 'Asian' in the examples I have quoted above, we would have sentences that many will agree exemplify marginalisation or the making invisible of the second group. Just as such sentences would be sexist, so my examples are examples of anti-Asian language.

Too Narrow A Conception of Racial Discrimination

A focus on 'colour' as the basis of uniting and mobilising those who suffer from racial discrimination falsely equates racial discrimination with colour-discrimination. While there is good evidence that in the case of face-to-face discrimination, for example in the context of seeking accommodation or employment, colour is a decisive factor (Brown and Gay 1985; Commission for Racial Equality, 1990; Foyster et al. 1990), this is really only the ground floor of racism rather than the whole building. It is generally recognised that class is a factor which contributes to racial discrimination and to racial disadvantage. Inferior treatment on the basis of colour can create a subordinate class which, by virtue of its socio-economic location, could continue to suffer comparative disadvantage even were colour prejudice to wane. Thus, for instance, employers who prefer a public school, Oxbridge background will disadvantage the majority of society, but may have a disproportionately greater impact on racial minorities, and this fact is acknowledged in the British legal concept of indirect racial discrimination.(4) While proponents of the concept of 'black' recognise how class is interrelated with race, they overlook how cultural differences can also disadvantage and be the basis of discrimination, e.g., in employment on the grounds of one's dress, dietary habits, or desire to take leave from work on one's holy days rather than those prescribed by the custom and practice of the majority community. An emphasis on discrimination against 'black' people systematically obscures the cultural antipathy to Asians (and, no doubt, others), how Asian cultures and religions have been racialised, and the elements of discrimination that Asians (and others) suffer. If colour (or colour and class) were the sole basis of racism in British society it would be impossible to explain the finding of all the white attitude surveys over more than a decade that self-assigned racial prejudice against Asians is higher, sometimes much higher, than against black people (e.g. Brown 1984: 290; Jowell et al. 1986:150 and 164; Today 14 March 1990; Amin and Richardson 1992: 19-21). Moreover, explanations to do with length of settlement and mutual familiarisation belie the fact that the difference in the prejudice against the two groups may be growing (Young 1992: 181).

The emphasis on colour-discrimination and colour-identity denies what otherwise would be obvious: the hostility of the majority is likely to be particularly forceful against non-white individuals who are members of a community (and not just free-floating or assimilated individuals), which is sufficiently numerous to reproduce itself as a community and has a distinctive and cohesive value system which can be perceived as an alternative to and a possible challenge to the norm; this phenomenon is currently growing in Britain and disproportionately impacts upon Asians. It is what explains some of the contradictions in contemporary racism, such as the observation that white working class youth culture is incorporating, indeed, emulating, young black men and women, while hardening against groups like South Asians and Vietnamese (Cohen 1988: 83; Boulton and Smith 1992; Back 1993). A glance at the newspapers will quickly reveal that as many race relations battles turn on issues of culture and minority rights as on colour discrimination and socio-economic deprivation. 'Black' obscures this and prevents Asians from fully articulating and mobilising against the nature of their oppression.

One of the ways of appreciating how the condition and concerns of British Asians are overlooked and distorted because of a doctrinaire assumption about the nature of racial discrimination, is by observing and drawing an analogy from how 'black' British activists approach the issue in Europe. The observation I am referring to has been excellently put by Ann Dummett, who deserves to be quoted at length:

There is a widespread belief among black people in Britain that you have to be black to be oppressed. This is putting crudely an assumption that is often not spelt out, but it is evident that this assumption is held from the way many black people who have become concerned about 1992 talk about racism on the continent. Instead of showing especial concern about Turks in Germany, who suffer anti-Turkish prejudice and discrimination in ways that are at least as oppressive as the way British blacks suffer, they often concentrate on the situation of black Germans -- children usually of black American servicemen and German mothers -- and of black immigrants to Germany like Ghanaians, Mozambicans and so on. These latter suffer frightening degrees of hostility and, in places, violence, but to single them out and ignore or give only secondary importance to the Turks is to take a seriously distorted view of racism in Germany (Dummett 1992: 8).

A False Essentialism

Talk about 'black' people, especially where this is supposed to be or in practice becomes the predominant way of conceptualising the people in question, suggests a false essentialism, namely, that all non-white groups have something in common other than how others treat them. The harm to Asians is that usually what happens in the manufacture of a 'black' commonality is that a set of features are plucked from Afro-Caribbean history or contemporary experience and said to be paradigmatically 'black' (Bonnett 1993: 43-44); Asians are then shown to approximate to this paradigm, or sometimes the writer fails to show any approximation and simply insists that if one looks hard enough one will find it. In my original. discussion I cited the much-praised Paul Gilroy's, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, as the worst case of this (Modood 1988a: 400). A more extended critique of that text along the same lines has been made by Robert Miles. In an article published in French, Miles argues that Gilroy, having:

posited the existence of a 'black' social movement involving people of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian origin . . . ignore[s] the nature and content of cultural forms of South Asian origin. As a result, we are left with an analysis in which it appears that people of South Asian origin are granted a 'walk-on' part in a cultural context shaped largely, if not exclusively, by young British people of Caribbean origin (Miles 1991: 150-151; p. 14 in English typescript version, kindly supplied by the author).

'Black' Obscures Asian Needs and Distorts Analysis

Because 'black' is powerfully evocative of people of African origins, its usage inevitably gives prominence to Afro-Caribbeans, to the point that it obscures the fact that amongst non-white groups in Britain, Asians form an ever-growing majority. While this is not usually quite as gross as the two recent academic assertions that, of non-white groups, people of West Indian origins are most numerous (McIlroy 1989: 235; Waldinger et al. 1990: 85), this error does represent a genuine state of mind in this country, not least amongst race egalitarians. Ken Young and Pat Gay's claim of an Afro-Caribbean under-representation amongst Community Relations Officers is typical of occupational analyses which are only coherent on the false assumption that Afro-Caribbean and Asian populations are roughly of the same size (Young and Gay 1988:83-84 and 95). I have elsewhere given examples of how this marginalisation of Asians is widespread in research and political literature (Modood 1988a: 399-400), so it is not therefore surprising that it should also exist at the level of practical action. For example, Bonnett found that 'most of the "Black Studies" courses introduced in inner-city schools in the early 1970s were dominated almost exclusively by African, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American self-image and history' (1990: 4). Of course this is a 1970s example and therefore pre-dates the institutional use of the inclusive 'black'; but what, then, is the explanation behind the following two 1989 examples. Linbert Spencer, a prominent race equality professional, managed to get through a whole BBC Radio 4 programme on case-studies of racial discrimination in employment without a single Asian appearing, and the TUC workbook, Tackling Racism, much of which was in the form of photographic cameos, was notable (except that nobody noticed it) too, for a virtual absence of Asian faces. Perhaps these are all errors and over-sights that can be corrected in due course. What, however, is one to make of the deliberate and institutionalised expression of this inequality in the Labour Party's Black Sections' resolution in early 1989 that, despite their over 2:1 population ratio, Asian and Afro-Caribbean MPs should be in equal numbers?

Where there is a mental and numerical marginalisation, it naturally follows that the distinctive concerns of the Asian communities will be marginalised. It is notable, for example, that despite the high levels of attacks on Asians and their property from the 1960s onwards, attempts to get the police and policy makers to address this basic issue of security had, till very recently, been less effective than the attempts to get them to focus on the equality of treatment of offenders by the criminal justice system, an issue up to now of far less importance to Asians. Immigration rules, transmission of parental culture to children, minority religious observance in schools, support for large families and self-employment are a number of issues which are of greater importance to Asians than to others, but because Asians have not been in a position to push them to the top of the agenda, these have received relatively less attention in the race equality movement than Asians have felt they deserved. The shock of the Rushdie Affair to this movement is a very good example of the lack of understanding there is of Asian community concerns (Modood 1989 and 1990). Yet, as we all know, it is shocks such as these, though the Rushdie Affair was far more peaceful than is usual with anti-racism explosions, that lead to paradigm-shifts, and I am pleased to note that the point I am making here has begun to get recognition. Malcolm Cross (1991) in a New Community editorial has asked for the putting aside of simple social science conflations and for a new agenda for policy and research built out of the self-expression of ethnic minorities and their own critiques of their oppression. More specifically, John Rex, whose perspective is well known for giving primacy to metropolitan social structures and distributive processes over ethnicity, has recently stated:

It can be argued that amongst social scientists and policy makers, the structure of the various Asian communities and the problems which Asians face have been seriously misunderstood because of the focus on the disadvantages suffered by, and discrimination against, Blacks (1991: 93).

A Too Politicised Identity

Asians (and for that matter any other group) need a richer and more rounded public identity than one focussed on politics can allow. People of African origins can use the concept of 'black' with a historical depth and a cultural texture through freighting it with an African diasporic ethnic pride, as famously captured in the 'Black is Beautiful' slogan, or in the newer idea of 'black Atlantic' (Gilroy 1993). For Asians, 'black' can be no more than 'a political colour', a reference to a limited aspect of their being, which inevitably requires them to give greater prominence to an aspect of their political being than is important to them or than they consider sensible; and, willy nilly, it gives a leadership role to those Asians who, whatever their standing in or commitment to the various Asian communities, can identify with and internalise the politics of anti-colour discrimination. This is too gross a strait-jacket for Asian community concerns and qualities which Asians may wish to promote.

Interestingly enough, as a result of The Satanic Verses affair, some Muslim activists are simplifying the range and variety of Muslim values and practices into a simple oppositional, political Islamism, so that the very term 'Muslim' becomes identified with their own political causes. It is interesting that many of those who have been at the forefront in homogenising non-whites under 'black' now forcefully criticise Muslim activists for manufacturing, out of a Muslim heterogeneity, a homogeneity to suit their political ends! Thus the Southall Black Sisters responded to the political Islamism of the Rushdie Affair by setting up Women Against Fundamentalism 'to challenge the assumption that minorities in this country exist as unified, internally homogeneous groups' (Women Against Fundamentalism 1990: 2; see also Yuval-Davis 1992: 284), and in particular to oppose the 'seemingly seamless (and supra-racial) Muslim consensus in Britain' (Connolly 1990: 6). In a similar vein, the ESRC Centre for Research into Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick has deemed that ethnic mobilisation around Islam is 'potentially negative' because it offends liberal and secular values and distracts from work towards colour-equality, while 'social and political action based on racial considerations' is thought to be 'creative' (CRER 1990: 4-5). My point is not simply to show how a pro-'black' point of view can easily become an anti-'Muslim' one; the critical point is that those who deployed, or went along with a coercive, essentialist, political concept of 'black' have no principled arguments against a coercive, essentialist, political concept of 'Muslim' -- hence their opposition must turn on a secular prejudice against religious mobilisation despite all their arguments about the dangers to heterogeneity (Modood 1994).

Not Conducive to Ethnic Pride

Even if there is a descriptive, sociological concept of 'black' based upon statistically inferred colour discrimination (and I have already suggested that the concept of racial discrimination is more complex than colour discrimination), this concept is of a negative condition, of how others treat oneself, not the basis of a positive identity likely to foster pride in one's origins and establish a secure psychological platform for active participation in British society. For, while mobilisation to secure rights requires a dynamic of group pride, 'black' serves to obscure Asian identities and smother the basis of ethnic pride.

The crux of the issue here rests on a distinction between the values, aspirations, and community structures of an oppressed group (its mode of being) and the social structures and ideological forms which oppress that group (its mode of oppression). A cardinal error of 1980s anti-racism is to substitute mobilisation around opposition to a mode of oppression (racism) for the freedom to be what one is and aspires to be, for one's mode of being. By understanding minorities such as Asians primarily in terms of racism and anti-racism, anti-racists in effect create group identities exclusively from the point of view of the dominant whites and fail to recognise that those whom white people treat as no more than the raw material of racist categorisation have, indeed, a mode of being of their own which defies such reduction (Modood 1990a). Many anti-racists' interest in Asians is not in Asians but in the condition of victim; Asians who experience racial discrimination are reduced to discriminated beings ('blacks') who happen to be Asians, and who should publicly proclaim their mode of oppression as their primary identity, while confining the symbolic power of their mode of being to secondary occasions. But this is too superficial a view of oppression and of ethnic mobilisation against racial subordination. We need a concept of race that enables us to understand that any oppressed group feels its oppression most according to those dimensions of its being which it (not the oppressor) values most; moreover, it will resist its oppression from those dimensions of its being from which it derives its greatest collective psychological strength. We see this very clearly with working class Asians (and other) Muslims. Despite being the most racially disadvantaged group in Britain, measured in terms of unemployment, over-representation in manual work, educational qualifications, poor housing, attacks on person and property and so on (Jones 1993), they have borne this marginal and oppressive condition with stoicism and kinship self-help, but exploded on an issue of religious honour, when it was perceived that The Satanic Verses not only limited one's material opportunities but attacked the very core of one's being (Modood 1990a, 1990b). It is most revealing that the Muslim protesters neither looked for nor were offered any 'black' solidarity and that one of the leaders of 'black' politics, Paul Boateng MP, dismissed Muslim anger as having nothing to do with 'the black discourse' (Kramer 1991: 75).It has been argued that as all identities are situational, individuals are capable of identities of several sorts, and that Asians can be found who have a strong Asian identity and a sense of political blackness, even if not fully acknowledged by themselves (Drury 1990). Drury offers as evidence that 92 per cent of a sample of about a hundred teenage Sikh girls in the early 1980s rejected the term 'black' as a self-description, but a significant number thought there were commonalities of experience between all non-white people. Yet this surely confirms that a sense of being 'black' is for most Asians a forced identity, on the periphery of their conception of themselves and not a source of pride or even of self-defence. The general point I am making is not peculiar to Muslims or Asians. Materialistic theories of anti-racism typically underestimate the defence of group dignity and the positive role of ethnic pride. The 'black is beautiful' campaign in the long term reached far more American blacks than the civil rights campaign and, indeed, provided a personal and collective psychological dynamic which fed into the latter, and which enabled blacks to take advantage of the socio-economic opportunities created by the politics.

Some advocates of 'black' have themselves latterly argued that British anti-racism has been overconcerned with a white audience and too little concerned with understanding, relating to, or giving space to, the rich history of black self-emancipation, especially in respect of forms of expressive culture, and yet these forms of black resistance are critical to racial equality, broadly conceived (Gilroy 1987). This could perhaps be an important bridge for the acceptance of a parallel argument on behalf of Asians.

The Coerciveness of the Advocates of 'Black'

The final reason I offer is perhaps not inherent in the concept of 'black' but rather the way it has been promoted by its advocates. Given the various reasons why I think the concept is harmful to Asians, it was perhaps not likely that the majority of Asians would embrace it; and yet, with its simple appeal of political mobilisation and inter-group unity directed at a pervasive dimension of constraint affecting all non-whites, it was not impossible that Asians could be persuaded of its merits. The advocates of 'black', however, understandably impatient to build political power and effect change, operated as if the consent of Asians (and perhaps others) could be taken for granted and that the selling of the concept to the grass roots was unnecessary. This, however, while typical of a certain kind of militancy, may have been a fatal error (Bonnett 1990: 8-9). Working in racial equality administration and training in the mid and late 1980s, I have witnessed at first hand how 'black' has been, and continues to be, imposed in these contexts. I have had race equality activists and professionals flatly deny that there is an issue here to discuss, and have been ostracised for persisting with my argument and have been called, including in print, a trouble-maker and an anti-black racist.(5) Moreover, I know many Asians, blacks and whites who have said they have been intimidated from questioning the appropriateness of the concept of 'black'.

The charge of coercion is difficult to substantiate (hence my resort to anecdotal evidence), but one way in which it could be done is to demonstrate that the majority of Asians did not embrace the concept that the majority of the professionals and activists were promoting; if this could be shown it could suggest not only that Asians did not support the professionals, etc., but that the Asians' failure to register their dissent in any major way was because they felt intimidated. When I first elaborated my critique, I naturally contended that the majority of Asians did not accept 'black' as a public identity. Yet I had to recognise that there was very little evidence to support my view (though I noted that those who could have gathered the evidence, namely, race relations researchers and those who fund them, had a vested interest in not doing so), though someone of the authority of Professor Bhikhu Parekh, Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (1985-90) had explicitly stated that 'the term black is rejected by the bulk of the Asians' (Parekh 1987: xii). No one had thought the issue worthy of an opinion survey, in the absence of which Parekh has estimated that 'about 70 per cent resent it, 10 per cent identify themselves as black, and the rest do so with qualifications' (Roy 1988). This has so far proved to be an extremely insightful estimation. For when the BBC Asian television programme Network East, the audience of which is weighted towards the young, carried in March 1989 an item on this issue, even though several speakers accused Asians who objected to be called 'black' of being racist, stupid and divisive, this did not prevent, nearly two-thirds of the over 3,000 who took part in the subsequent telephone poll rejecting the term 'black' for Asians.(6) A battery of questions on identity are included in the PSI-SCPR Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities which will be the first time that the issue of 'black' and Asians will have been surveyed nationally. Till these findings are published in 1995 nothing superior to the BBC poll is available.

New Identities

These then, I suggest, are some of the reasons why the hegemony of 'black' over other ethnic/racial identities was doomed. If one single remark combines and epitomises these criticisms it is Yasmin Alibhai's contention that when most Asians hear the word 'black', they are unlikely to think of themselves, so many fail to apply for jobs where advertisements specifically welcome black people (Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 17 November 1988). It is, therefore, not surprising that in 1988 some Asians decided that an anti-racism which was so out of touch with or defiant of basic Asian community concerns had to be challenged. The year began with the National Association of Asian Probation Staff boycotting the Home Office staff ethnic monitoring exercise because it classified Asians as a sub-division of Black, and was followed by an on-going debate in the minority press, especially in New Life, Asian Herald and the Afro-Caribbean Voice, with occasional overspills into the national media (Modood 1988b; Roy 1988; Uppal 1988; Kogbara 1988; Heart of the Matter, BBC TV, 10 July 1988) and academic journals (Modood 1988a).

This critique bore fruit when in December of that year the Commission of Racial Equality (CRE) decided to cease to recommend that people of Asian origin be classified as Black and in the following month the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) announced that they were proceeding to the next stage in the ethnic question trials for the 1991 Census with the same categories as the CRE. It is perhaps an open question as to the significance of these administrative decisions: were they just petty terminological changes or did they mark an important milestone in the philosophy of race relations? The CRE, which was disinclined to read too much into them, was told by a New Statesman and Society editorial that it 'should be publicising its decision with confidence instead of weakly whispering out an important decision, almost hoping nobody will notice' (23 December 1988). Phillip Nanton has argued that 'these attempts to capture an acceptable ethnic categorisation suggest that a fundamental change has taken place in the definition of ethnicity, for ethnic categories can no longer be regarded as 'given' but are open to interest group pressure and negotiation' (1989: 556). I would go further.

Race equality thinking consists of a number of different ideological strands. I have in mind ideological outlooks such as universalism which emphasises uniformity of treatment; or social utilitarianism which focuses on remedial state action to overcome racial disadvantage; or the anti-racism which is a dimension of class struggle; or the ethnic pluralism which emphasises the diversity of values, the cultural dimension of oppression and the non-political ways in which ethnic groups contribute to social outcomes including racial equality. Each of these is an important ingredient of egalitarian theory and practice, but different times and situations will see a different balance between them. With the possible exception of multi-cultural education, the balance in the 1980s was in favour of universalism and social utilitarianism wrapped in a rhetoric of anti-racism, and one of the expressions of this mix was the acceptance of the political 'black' into the mainstream. In taking the decision that utilitarian and anti-racist perspectives are not decisive on the question of ethnic monitoring, for monitoring classifications should harmonise with people's self-perceptions, the CRE and OPCS has limited these perspectives in favour of the principles of ethnic pluralism and respect for ethnic identities. It may be that this is an intimation of a new balance amongst the competing and complementary strands of our concept of racial equality. It may be that the decision to cease to officially impose the term 'black' upon people of South Asian origin will in retrospect be seen as marking the limit of the influence of militant anti-racism and the opening towards a new balance in the concept of racial equality.

One response of theorists such as Hall and Ali to the end-of-the-hegemony-of-'black' has been to shift attention from organised politics and social structures to cultural identities and their manufacture and communication, from 'a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself (Hall 1992: 253). With this goes a celebration of 'new ethnicities' and cultural hybridity, and a critique of 'ethnic absolutism' -- the idea that ethnic identities are simply 'given', are static and ahistorical and do not (or should not) change under new circumstances or by sharing social space with other heritages and influences. The emphasis on the historical nature of ethnicity (as opposed to conformity to an atemporal essence or an imagined golden age), on hybridity without loss of integrity or self-respect, on cultural openness and multi-textured identities, rather than on the coercive simplicities of 'black' absolutism, is to be welcomed, and may allow Asians to develop a more authentic repertoire of self-images than 'black' allowed. Yet this new turn is not without its dangers. If 'new' simply comes to describe the avant-garde, then it is clear that most British Asians will once again suffer marginalisation. A rejection of theories of primordial ethnic absolutism should not prevent us from accurately describing where most Asians are, regardless of whether it seems sufficiently 'new' or progressive. We must not pit 'new' and 'old' ethnicities against each other: we must avoid the elitism of cultural vanguardism that devalues and despises where the ordinary majority of any group or social formation is at -- an elitism so thoughtlessly exemplified in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, to the loss of us all, new and old. And yet in the loss of hegemony there may be wisdom. For in place of a 'two-worlds' Britain, Rushdie now urges that we must stop thinking in binary, oppositional terms for 'the them-and-us rhetoric of victimisation, no matter how legitimate it may seem, creates as many cultural problems as it addresses' (Rushdie 1993).

Notes

This article is based on a paper given at the conference on 'The Mobilisation of Ethnic Minorities and Ethnic Social Movements in Europe', University of Warwick, 3-5 April 1992.

1. The British Sociological Association's 'Anti-Racist Language: Guidance for Good Practice', states that 'some Asians in Britain object to the use of the word "black" being applied to them', but most British sociologists of race feel that an insufficient reason to seek a more appropriate terminology.

2. Interestingly, the two British academics who have been stimulated to discuss the issue at any length have decided to abandon the term 'black'. One favours the less convenient but more descriptive, 'people who are not white' (Mason 1990), and the other has adopted 'Asian, black and other minority ethnic' (Cole 1993). Goulbourne's book (1991) is perhaps the first on British race relations to systematically replace 'black' with 'non-white'.

3. This formulation is used by, for example, the London Boroughs of Haringey and Hackney. In private correspondence they have informed me that 'ethnic minorities' in the formula refers to Cypriots and Turks. Other uses of the formula mean the phrase to include Asians.

4. Not that the position of non-whites in higher education is one of uniform under-representation, even at Oxbridge (Modood 1993).

5. Ali herself makes this charge against me (Ali 1991: 207); indeed, it was also made at the conference where this paper was given. It might therefore be appropriate for me to say that while I am aware of the mutual antipathies between Asians and Afro-Caribbeans (as described, e.g., in James 1986, and Bains 1988) I have always opposed them, treating them as no less a form of racial prejudice than that of whites for non-whites, and have endeavoured to develop my argument without conceding anything to them. For anyone interested in seeing how textual analysis can degenerate into misattribution, criticism by innuendo and character assassination, see Goulbourne 1993: 186-189.

6. A researcher with extensive knowledge of Asians, especially youth, in Southall was greatly surprised that as many as a third of all callers said 'Yes' to 'Black' and wonders whether all of those callers were Asians (Baumann, MS 1994).

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Biographical note: DR TARIQ MODOOD was a lecturer in political theory before entering racial equality policy work, including at the Commission for Racial Equality. Subsequently he has been a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and University of Manchester, and is now a Senior Fellow at Policy Studies Institute. His publications include Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (Runnymede Trust, 1992), Racial Equality (Institute of Public Policy Research, 1994) and (co-author) Changing Ethnic Identities (PSI, 1994).

Address: Policy Studies Institute, 100 Park Village East, London NW1 3SR.

COPYRIGHT 1994 British Sociological Association Publication Ltd.

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Review article: Europe's African Heritage in the Creative Work of Maud Sulter.

TEXT:

The poet, photographer, and art historian Maud Sulter was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1960, of Ghanaian and Scots parentage. She has lectured in fine art and art history at a number of English universities and has curated her own and other artists' work at British galleries since the mid-1980s, including The People's Gallery, London; the Tate Gallery, Liverpool; and, in Glasgow, the Street Level Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Art. She began exhibiting her photography and mixed media work a decade ago and has continued to do so on a roughly annual basis. Her work has been exhibited all over Britain, as well as in Ireland, Germany, South Africa, and North America. Sulter has contributed to a number of anthologies of black women's writing, including Margaret Busby's international anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and has edited two art-historical collections, Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen's Creativity (1990) and Echo: Works by Women Artists 1860-1940 (1991). Her own creative writing has been anthologized, for example in Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (1994). Sulter's poetry is collected in As a Blackwoman (1985; reprinted 1989). Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree (1989), the CD-ROM Hysteria (1991), and the installation of Alba (1995) combine creative writing with powerful visual material. Sulter's photography is included in public collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The City Art Centre, Edinburgh; and the Arts Council of Great Britain. This summary of professional achievements points to the strong autobiographical and political contexts that frame her creative output: "(My work) has to be placed within ... my environment. That environment is European, within the western perspective, urban, and moving steadily toward the Right" (Hamid 8). This review article focuses on how Sulter's poetry investigates identity within a heterogeneous historical black presence throughout Europe and Britain, and in more personal contexts.

Focusing on the contemporary Black British experience in a Pan-European and African context, Sulter's aim is, at least in part, didactic: she seeks to educate her audience by exposing the presence of African peoples and their descendants in Europe over many centuries. She states "the fact that Black people have been in Europe for over four hundred years has to be taken on board" (Wilson and Somerville-Arjat 29) and uses the historical record to imagine, through poetry, the actual African women at the sixteenth-century court of James IV: "I dream of Blackwomen in the Scottish Court / Their dresses and jewels, / They raise their eyebrows at the ridiculous cold" (Zabat ll. 18-19, 61). This vision also inspires the soundtrack to the Alba installation where Sulter reads her "Alba Sonnets." Sonnet 1 begins "Auld lange syne in the Kingdom of Alba," placing the poem in Scotland's distant past by using ancient Scots words in the opening phrase, and the Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba. This opening line gives the poem a folklore context for its subject: "Black people at the Scottish court / fired up / hot tempers wild emotions / and jealous lust" (Track 1).

Mining the historical record in this way is a political act since Britain's African heritage, its "black" history, is not normally treated in school or university history courses, nor is it widely regarded as integral to national identity. The 1950s immigrations of Caribbean and Asian peoples are typically but erroneously viewed as that point in history when dark-skinned people first arrived in Britain. Other creative writers in Britain, the Caribbean, and North America have recently turned to the historical record, often to the Transatlantic Slave trade and the slave narrative tradition, but Sulter's interest in a specifically Scottish, preslavery experience sets her apart from almost all of her creative contemporaries. Furthermore, Scotland's historical black population is less well-known than that of England or Wales, so Sulter's creative focus on and use of the Scottish historical record is a fresh perspective that predates recent academic research on the topic (see Duffield; Hargreaves; Evans; and Rewt).

Whereas many black British poets use Standard English, Caribbean Creoles, or a mixture of the two, Sulter extends issues around language and identity by focusing on varieties of "home-grown" languages in Britain. Standard English is recognized as a potentially oppressive medium because of Britain's colonial past, but also because of processes of colonization within Britain that threaten Welsh and Scottish cultural identity, particularly language indigenous to these regions. Sulter uses Scots vernacular to legitimize a black Scottish urban experience; in doing so, she participates in wider debate about Scottish writing and national identity. The title of her photographic exhibition Syrcas is a Welsh word; the accompanying publication is bilingual. Not only does this illustrate how Sulter will manipulate language to make her work more accessible to a specific audience (Syrcas opened in Wales), it also reflects her sensitivity to issues of personal and national identity in a contemporary, regionalized, and multiracial British context.

Sulter does not restrict historical explorations to Britain; put another way, hers is a wide angle of vision that sees regionalized Britain in a European context. Visual evidence of a multiracial Germany--August Sander's 1926 photograph of a black man in Germany employed by a circus--led Sulter to write her poem "Blood Money." It is concerned not only with the treatment of black people in Nazi Germany, but also with a wider African ancestry throughout Europe that resists easy racial or other categorization: "a Belgian, a Muslim, a Protestant, a Croat, a Celt, a Bosnian, a Jew, a Slav, a Pole, a Canadian, a Catholic / don't stop, the list is as endless as the human race" (Syrcas ll. 29-30, 35). The poem attempts to educate the reader about the realities of a Pan-European black history; by emphasizing its pervasiveness she insists that racial categorization is both dangerous--as witnessed in the Nazi death camps and in the recent resurgence of far-right neo-Nazi activity in Europe--and scientifically meaningless. The poem "Tottenham Cemetery" (As a Blackwoman 31) deals with the contemporary authority's attitudes to the recent desecration of Jewish graves in the London cemetery. Dismissed by the police as "childish pranks" (l.12), the poem explores the racial motivation behind the attack, the narrator emphasizing the danger of complacency by warning that "it was not the dead / we had to fear--but the living..." (ll. 27-28).

So Sulter is concerned with educating her audience, describing her work as "upwards and outwards. Its primary motivation is for constructive radical change" in perceptions of history and national identity" (Wilson and Somerville-Arjat 27). Her investigations into the complex historical and contemporary relationships between Africa and Europe particularize experience, focusing on what is heterogeneous in the flow of historical continuity. "Jacaranda--a Cafe" (As a Blackwoman 31) investigates the attitudes of liberal white Londoners who discuss black customers in the cafe as little more than exotic stereotypes, for example, the man whose "dreads are so beautiful / so frightfully quaint / man / All he needs for the video / is a bit of war paint" (ll. 32-37). Sulter draws attention to patronizing attitudes, and to the cost to the black community when trendy Londoners "pilfer our culture our foods our sounds" (ll. 70-71). While these attitudes are foregrounded in poems that deal with a Scottish context, when Sulter deals with her own home ground she also explores the general lack of awareness of Scotland's multiracial identity. Her poem "The Privilege of the Fairskinned" (As a Blackwoman 27) compares the experience of being black in England to different experiences in Scotland, where

If you're the only black in the neighbourhood it makes no difference

Nigger Darkie Paki all means the same to them (ll. 8-12)

In "By the Pond" (Zabat 17) Sulter illustrates the sense of isolation that black people feel growing up in Scotland, and their invisibility in Scottish society. The poem is about a young black girl who is sexually assaulted in a Close (i.e., alley), locating the poem in an urban Scottish environment. The poem finishes with the question, repeated three times, "And who would miss a little / coloured girl?" (ll. 67-77). The use of repetition expresses the thoughts of both the attacker and his victim, while the addition of the word "here" at the end of the third repetition reminds the reader of a specific Scottish location where the loss/invisibility of a black girl seems negligible. While racism characterizes both English and Scottish attitudes and practices in Sulter's view, she differentiates these regions to challenge conventional stereotypes of a homogenous "black history" and of black people who, her poem insists, live in and draw on ancestry that is culturally and regionally specific.

Sulter is equally concerned to distinguish gender as a defining aspect of identity. Much of her creative and critical work focuses on gender, as suggested by the title of her first collection of verse, As a Blackwoman, and in the title of her second collection, Zabat, also the name of a photographic exhibition. The definition below claims an Egyptian derivation and links Sulter's words and photographs to a lineage of female power:

Za `bat, n. 1. Sacred dance performed by groups of thirteen. 2. `An occasion of power'--possible orig. Of witches Sabbath. 3. Blackwomen's rite of passage (f. Egy. 18th dyn) The term is explored more fully in a review of the portraits that comprise Sulter's Zabat series: Zabat, as the definition suggests, is an occasion for the claiming of power--black women's power and also a celebration of their creativity. The work consists of nine portraits and is based upon the muses of Greek mythology (originally the goddesses of memory, later identified with individual arts and sciences).... Sulter uses this rhetorical device as a way of questioning the cultural and historical amnesia of the West. These are women not simply to be looked at but to be listened to. Importantly the portraits are also accompanied by texts. They have their stories to tell; histories which demand to be heard. (Richon 8)

Much of Sulter's work affirms a black female history, through metaphors that express the colonial encounter as an act of rape, as well as in poems that explore contemporary reproductive issues. Africa, positioned as an unproblematic, inclusive motherland, is celebrated as a source of inspiration and strength in a number of her poems, as is blackness, equated with beauty and with claiming a sense of self, for both men and women. "Winter Solstice" uses a call and responses Blues style to encourage black men to remember the value of this heritage and their role in promoting black culture, ending "Hey Brother / black man/Just who will father our future?" (As a Blackwoman ll. 109-11, 50-53).

Sulter's own personal history embodies all these concerns, reflecting her particular racial ancestry and her urban Scottish environment. Poems are often written in a Scots vernacular and/or use Scottish words, phrases, and locations. Her poem "Thirteen Stanzas" (As a Blackwoman 13-15) features "a black working class girl" (l. 74) in a deprived urban Scottish environment whose experience includes "trips tae the local shoapin centre dog shit boarded up / businesses" (ll. 1-2). The words "me" and "shoapin" reproduce the Glasgow pronunciation of "to" and "shopping." The poem also refers to the notoriously unhealthy Scottish diet, how "sugar fuels hollow bellies" (l. 27). It faces the cost of poverty against a background of industrial conflict in 1970s and early 1980s Scotland: "strikes layoffs / shut downs heroin runnin inglorious put downs of life / on the dole" (ll. 29-32). The poem gives an authentic description of life in a working-class area of Scotland; with the black girl integral to this urban environment, the poem confirms a legitimate black Scottish presence in a contemporary setting.

This stress on the harshness of life contrasts with Sulter's short autobiographical story, "No Oxbridge Spires" (Original Prints III, 1989), the title referring to the heartland of England's exclusive intellectual establishment in Oxford and Cambridge universities. The story is set in the 1960s Gorbals area of Glasgow, renowned for its poverty, with specific geographical references to "Caledonian Road" and "Crown Street." It tells of close family relationships, especially between a young black girl and her white maternal grandfather. Narrated by the girl, the story is written in a plain, conversational style that enhances the sense of realism. The story shows that the young narrator is aware of her racial identity and how this links her to a larger community and history: "Well, of course, it's a well known fact that black people could fly before slavery days and that our wings are re-forming to this very day . . ." (113); the girl observes, "(O)ff I fly like the ancestors on my daddy's side" (113). A loving family relationship is clear and shows the narrator's awareness of and pride in her identity. The conversational style, with the narrator looking back nostalgically to a happy childhood, illustrates how a close-knit family can draw upon empowering memories that outweigh those of poverty and hardship. Remembering a loving family is also the subject of Sulter's poem "Headstone" (As a Blackwoman 59), though here the effect of poverty cannot be easily ignored. The narrator remembers her mother and how lack of money resulted in her being buried without a headstone: "An unmarked grave / for the person who / was closest to / my childhood" (11. 1-4). Such experiences are brought into an explicitly political context in "Thirteen Stanzas" where the narrator recalls a particular friend:

remembrance of yir fair self of a friendship between women white working class woman Black working class girl a cross the divide of race we were women in struggle women in struggle women in struggle united (11. 73-78)

Sulter's poetry is written mainly in free verse, which enhances its accessible style. This directness, at its best, results in an immediacy that allows the complex subject of identity to take center stage, reinforcing the didactic purpose of much of her work. However, her style can be reductive, taking the form of well-worn slogans, resulting in poems that lack depth: how the verse is written, then, seems to undermine the richness and complexity of her subject and her own experience. The most robust verse registers her autobiographical persona in historical and contemporary Scottish/ European contexts that intersects with the African Diaspora in ways that challenge narrow, settled ideas of national and individual identity. This is perhaps most powerful in Zabat: here, words and images leap off the pages, engaging The reader-viewer directly in ancient histories whose relevance is immediately apparent and compelling.

WORKS CITED

Busby, Margaret, ed. Daughters of Africa. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.

Duffield, Ian. "Identity, Community and the Lived Experience of Black Scots from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Centuries." Immigrants and Minorities 11.2 (1992): 105-29.

Evans, June. "African/Caribbeans in Scotland: A Socio-Geographical Study." PhD thesis. U of Edinburgh, 1996.

Hargreaves, John D. "West African Students in Britain: The Case Study of Aberdeen University." Africans in Britain. Ed. David Killingray. London: Cass, 1994. 12944.

Himid, Lubaina. The Thin Black Line. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox, 1989.

O'Rourke, Daniel, ed. Dream State: The New Scottish Poets. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994.

Sulter, Maud. Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox, 1989.

--. As a Blackwoman. London: Akira, 1985; rpt. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox, 1989.

--. "No Oxbridge Spires." Original Prints III. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989. 112-14.

--. Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen's Creativity. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox, 1990.

--. Echo: Works by Women Artists 1860-1940. London: Tate Gallery, 1991.

--. Hysteria. CD-ROM. Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1991.

--. Syrcas. Wrexham, Wales: Wrexham Library Arts Centre, 1993.

--. Alba. Installation. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 1995.

Rewt, Polly. "Roots: Scotland's African Inheritance." Exhibition brochure. Edinburgh: City Art Centre, 1997.

Richon, Olivier. "Zabat: A Photographic Work by Maud Sulter." Portfolio Magazine Summer/Autumn 1990: 8-9.

Wilson, Rebecca E., and Gillean Somerville-Arjat, eds. Sleeping with Monsters. Dublin: Wolfhound. First published Edinburgh' Polygon, 1990.

Jim Mabon is currently working on his MA with the Open University, focusing on historical and contemporary black writers in Scotland.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Indiana University Press

DESCRIPTORS: Art historians--Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Women poets --Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Women photographers--Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Africans--Portrayals, depictions, etc.

GEOGRPAHIC CODES/NAMES: 4EUUK United Kingdom; 4EUUS Scotland

NAMED PERSONS: Sulter, Maud--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88 ?

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Review article: Beto; magazine Africain independent - unabhaengiges Afrikanisches Magazin

Bowker Accession Number: 4056280XX
NOTES:
Magazine of African culture, politics and arts. back issues avail. Text in French and German

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Review article: Rehabilitating fatherland: Race and German remasculinization

JOURNAL CODE: GSIG
DOCUMENT TYPE: Feature
LANGUAGE: English

RECORD TYPE: Fulltext; Abstract
WORD COUNT: 9217
DIALOG(R)File 484:Periodical Abstracts Plustext
(c) 1999 Bell & Howell. All rts. reserv. 04089580 SUPPLIER NUMBER: 99029639
(THIS IS THE FULLTEXT)
ABSTRACT:
Fehrenbach discusses the moral rehabilitation of German masculinity after World War II. At that time, Germany was experiencing a wholesale "demasculinization" of daily life due to the absence of adequate German male authority and a corresponding increase of displays of female social and sexual autonomy.

TEXT:

At the opening of the 1952 conference in Wiesbaden, "The Fate of Mixed-Blood Children in Germany," Erich Linner, editor of the Frankfurrter Rundschau, was declared a "hero of humanity" Lijner was feted not for his journalistic achievement, but for becoming an adoptive father to Donatus, an interracial child born to a German refugee allegedly raped by an African American GI shortly after German defeat. Liner's heroization underlined his exceptionality as a rare role model for socially responsible paternalism. Indeed his anecdotes chronicling Doni's integration into Li*ner's white family emphasized less the personal relationship between adoptive father and son than the social implications and social utility of interracial fathering after National Socialism. LiBner's experience, that is, was packaged as a pedagogical example for the moral rehabilitation of German masculinity and the West German nation.1

The self-congratulatory atmosphere of these proceedings contrasted sharply with the negative, emotionally charged reception accorded the tens of thousands of "occupation children" born to German mothers and fathered by Allied personnel during the four years of military occupation? Immediately and irresistibly following the first births in 1946, public attention focused on a small but visible racial subcategory of these children, the so-called "Mischlinge" (or "mixed-bloods"), distinguished from the others by their black paternity.3 Although they constituted only a tiny minority of postwar German births (under 2 percent of all out-of-wedlock births in 1947, for a total of 3,000 by 1950), contemporary estimates inflated their numbers to between 10,000 and 950,000, indicating the disproportionately great symbolic significance accorded these children in post-Hitler Germany.4 In a period of military occupation and enforced political democratization, their very existence challenged historical definitions of national identity by invoking issues of race, transgressive female sexuality, and reproduction, and linking these with German military defeat, the loss of national sovereignty, and debilitated native masculinity

Postwar Germany, in fact, was said to be suffering from a serious Mainnerman,gel, or shortage of men. Indeed, the "crisis years" of the early occupation have been referred to as the "hour of women" because of both the inordinate amount of productive and reproductive work assumed by women in the wake of defeat and the absence or low public profile of German men, who were killed or missing in the war, held in prisonerof-war camps, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally exhausted, or unemployed due to reasons of health or their former political loyalties.5 In public and private parlance, moreover, German defeat was widely identified with demasculinization, as countless contemporary stories thematizing humiliated husbands unable to work, earn, or function-whether socially or sexually-suggest.b

Despite the prevalence of such accounts, this characterization was not quite accurate. Public life in postwar Germany did retain a masculine profile, as the ubiquitous uniformed men of the occupation forces attested; all Germans, male and female alike, were subject to the "masculine" military governments of the victorious Allies. And that was precisely the problem. The issue was not the putative wholesale "demasculinization" or even "feminization" of daily life but the absence of adequate German male authority and a corresponding increase in displays of female social and sexual autonomy. This lack of German male authority was sorely felt both in the overtly political public sphere and, in an era of severe housing shortages, the less-than-private domestic sphere, where there could be, at least initially, no ready reversion to normative social and sexual relations between the sexes. In the wake of defeat and occupation, German men lost their status as protectors, providers, and even (or so it seemed for a short time) as procreators: the three Ps that had traditionally defined and justified their masculinity.

In this article I investigate just one aspect of the postwar project to reassert native male authority in postwar West Germany by focusing on social policy and cultural representation concerning the relationships and offspring of white German women and African American GIs. My interest is twofold: first, to illuminate the particular ways that discourses of race figured in the "remasculinization" of postwar West Germany (to borrow from Susan Jeffords); and second, to sketch briefly the prescriptive nature and political function of this "new German man."'

Into the 1950s, official and public discourses regarding "occupation children" were conditioned by two distinct tales of origin that focused obsessively on the mother and the moral circumstances of conception.8 The first was one of victimization, in the form of German women's brutal rape by victorious enemy soldiers. Here Soviet soldiers played a prominent, but not exclusive, role. In southern Germany, terrifying stories circulated about the violence done to German women by French Moroccan troops and, to a lesser extent, African American GIs. By the early 195 Os, moreover, stories involving the brutal rape of German women by Allied troops came to serve a double duty as a trope for the national defilement and victimization of Germany in the local vernacular of Heimat histories, where the suffering of a small German community came to represent the experience of the nation as a whole.9 In Rudolf Albart's description of the "last and first days" in Bamberg (those leading up to and following defeat and occupation by American troops), he tells the story of a rape that reportedly took place the day the Americans entered the town:

That evening the engineer's wife, Betty K., was disturbed by a loud banging on the door while sitting in her kitchen. As she opened the door with her one-and-a-half-year-old in her arms, two tree-tall negro soldiers stood before her and immediately pushed past into her apartment.... According to her account, they jumped on her and raped her three times. During the crime, her father was forcibly restrained and finally gunned down. He died instantly. Only after completing their gruesome deed did the negroes depart the scene of their outrage, leaving behind a dead man and a degraded woman.10

What is striking and, as it turns out, paradigmatic about this account is the representation of rape by soldiers of color as a victimization of both the German woman, who is depicted as maternal rather than sexual, and the German man (or more precisely, the German father), an insubstantial image of ineffectuality. This double victimization narratively linked female defilement with the displacement and, ultimately, the death of native masculinity.11

A second trope, which appeared in such diverse sources as church sermons, feature films, and intelligence, police, and social welfare reports, focused on German women's willing (some would say willful) fraternization with occupying soldiers. Like the first, this too was a national narrative of social and sexual disorder, but one that distinctly shifted the attribution of guilt from vengeful masculine invaders to disloyal domestic partners. In 1946, to cite just one example, the Protestant High Consistory in Stuttgart denounced German women and girls who "degrade themselves through licentious behavior.... They forget the thousands of graves that surround them.... They forget their husbands, brothers, sons, boyfriends, who are still imprisoned or missing. They forget the many thousands of warwounded. They forget the entire plight and affliction of the Fatherland. Their conduct is an affront to the returning men and a vexation for the entire public."l2 German women's fraternization with occupation soldiers was widely characterized as dishonoring the memory and martial sacrifices of German men, and desacralizing-and in some cases, literally denigrating-the German fatherland. The German mothers of postwar "Mischlinge" became particular targets of public condemnation.13 In a period of debilitated German patriarchy and pride, native officials stepped in to fill the void with a particular brand of state paternalism.

Within a month of defeat, German state officials sought to nullify the reproductive consequences of conquest by relaxing, temporarily, Paragraph 218, which outlawed abortion. Indeed in late spring 1945, the Bavarian Landesregierung issued a secret memo (later burned) that expressly encouraged abortions in rape cases involving "colored" troops. Abortions were readily granted to women who provided a sworn written statement detailing "forceful" rape by enemy soldiers.14 By early 1946, however, there was a swift tightening around the issue of the women's innocence. If either her reputation or the details of her story seemed suspect, abortion was denied. Applications were increasingly rejected if the putative perpetrator was white, unless a commission of three doctors certified the existence of "severe medical indications" Medical review boards, local and state officials, and Christian clergymen rapidly began to suspect that women were relying on officially sanctioned abortion to rid themselves of the unwanted consequences of casual consensual sex with occupying soldiers. They feared that the availability of abortion was encouraging wily German women to surrender to their promiscuous proclivities and afterward misuse abortion as a form of state-sponsored birth control.15

Strikingly, however, women's motives were suspected exclusively when the putative perpetrator's race was white. In cases involving soldiers of color, applications continued to be approved on the basis of applicants' uncontested claims that bringing the pregnancy to term would result in unbearable "psychological or emotional suffering" for the woman and, not incidentally, for her husband or fiance, who could not be expected to bear with equanimity such an unbearable sexual and social affront. In the early days of occupation, then, racial stereotypes of sexually predatory black males tipped the balance in favor of women's applications; only somewhat later would the image of the pathologically promiscuous and materialist ' " or "negro-lover" be propagated and popularized.16

By spring 1946, as the incidence of rape and legal abortions declined, the first "occupation children" were born. The high number of births in Bavaria rankled state officials there, who sought in vain to negotiate with the American military government regarding the status of the children. Ultimately, all occupation children-including those of color-were grudgingly extended German citizenship, but only after Allied military government officials made it clear that they would neither entertain paternity suits nor readily grant citizenship to their troops' illegitimate offspring abroad. Despite this resolution, between 1946 and 1948, state officials attempted to deny public support to the mothers of interracial children in Bavaria, where the greatest percentage resided.17

Notably, then, by the end of the occupation, women's real or putative victimization played an ever-diminishing role in the formation of social policy regarding occupation children and their mothers. With the gradual return of German husbands from the war and POW camps, in fact, there was a marked increase in divorce and paternity suits, particularly if a new child had appeared during a husband's long absence. In many such cases, the husband contested paternity and petitioned to be absolved of his legal and financial responsibilities; under German law, all children lacking a male guardian became wards of the local or state youth office and hence eligible for public support.18

German state officials and social workers gradually retreated from their hostile attitude toward women's fraternization with white soldiers, particularly by 1948 when marriage was permitted between occupation soldiers and German women in the Western zones, and currency reform promised an end to the "hunger prostitution" thought to motivate much of the sexual promiscuity of the immediate postwar period. Interracial relations, however, continued to be considered transgressive of racial and national boundaries and subject to general condemnation, in part (ironically) because interracial marriages remained rare.19 In a period of enforced social and sexual normalization, when the commitment to renew the German family transcended partisan politics, women who gave birth to the interracial children of African American GIs were held up to public scrutiny as a morally unacceptable antinorm.20 Most were assumed (incorrectly) to be prostitutes or of the most lowly social rank, motivated by materialism rather than love, and thus by definition outside the bounds of respectable German femininity. The continued emphasis on these women's sexuality and materialism meant that well into the 1950s many observers, including social workers, had a hard time seeing them as properly maternal. Press reports early in the decade depicted them as uncaring or unwilling mothers, who opted to institutionalize their children rather than nurture them (when in fact over 70 percent of the children remained with their mothers) or who raised their children outside a proper family environment.21 Emigration to the United States would likely have satisfied such critics. But the paucity of transnational interracial marriages meant that the offspring of such relationships were overwhelmingly "illegitimate" and that the interracial child and its offending mother would remain German citizens on German soil.

For the balance of this article, I discuss a remarkable transformation: how and why public and official discourse moved from a passionate renunciation of paternal responsibility and support for Afro-German children to, by the mid-1950s, an equally passionate public commitment to their protection and nurture.

Shortly after the 1949 foundation of the Federal Republic, and again in 1952 as the first postwar interracial German children were entering German schools, West German federal and state officials, educators, sociologists, and psychologists began to collect statistical data and undertake scientific studies on German "Mischlinge." The first in this series was an informal census ordered in 1950 by the federal Ministry of the Interior to establish the overall number of interracial occupation children in the former French and U.S. zones of occupation (the American military government had forbidden such a survey throughout the occupation) and to determine the number maintained by public funds in orphanages, private or public homes, or foster care. Since the first births in late 1945, German state officials had lobbied Allied and, particularly, American officials to facilitate the recognition of paternity by occupation personnel, and into the 1950s continued to seek ways to mandate the payment of child support by the fathers. After 1949, the new federal government took up the cause, exhibiting a marked reluctance to assume the reproductive costs of occupation.22

In 1955, as the Federal Republic regained full national sovereignty, the newly established Foreign Ministry attempted to include the issue of child support in negotiations regarding West Germany's entry into NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). These efforts met with very limited success. While an agreement was reached on the procedures by which German authorities could establish American paternity and determine child support payments in German courts, attempts at implementation collapsed due to a distinct lack of cooperation from American military officers. Until the early 1960s, in fact, German youth offices found it extremely difficult to summon an American soldier to a paternity hearing, and German courts found it legally impossible to enforce payment of child support.23

By 1955, West Germany was both remilitarizing and remasculinizingand the two were not, of course, unconnected. Yet the revitalized Vaterland that was emerging by mid-decade was not the militarist one of yore. Military service had lost its allure, and the martial ideal never again presented itself as either a viable or particularly attractive model for masculinity in postwar West Germany.24 Rather, in the decade following the end of the occupation, the West German Vaterland was discursively refashioned as a land of fathers for reasons I hope to make clear.

After 1950, there were increasing cultural signs of an ideological reassertion and reformulation of German patriarchy. Articles in the West German popular and scholarly press continued to bemoan persistent problems stemming from the social dislocations of the war and its immediate aftermath. Particular attention was devoted to the proper socialization of youth, especially given alarming indications of endemic youthful criminality, sexual precociousness, moral confusion, and deficiencies in school performance and the ability to concentrate-a litany of ongoing concerns for public commentators, educators, and social welfare workers since the occupation years. What was new, however, was a small but steadily increasing sociological and psychological literature focusing on the role and responsibilities of fathers for reversing this trend.25

This wake-up call to German fathers took on a much more public and popular dimension that same year when the theme of paternal responsibility became a favorite among moviemakers and their state and federal sponsors. In 1951, the first Federal Film Prize was awarded by the West German Ministry of the Interior to Das doppelte Lottchen, the story of identical twin sisters of divorced parents who meet by chance at a girls' camp in the Bavarian Alps and hatch a plan to switch identities so they can each meet the unknown half of their former parental pair. Rapidly, the film focuses on the transformative effect that the overresponsible little Lotty has on her self-absorbed composer-father, so prone to self-indulgent self-expression (both artistic and sexual). At the end of the film, he reunites with his former wife, not out of any apparent rekindled attraction to the struggling working mother, but because of a deep if unanticipated devotion to his daughter, who had been reduced to a state of physical and emotional collapse by her strenuous efforts to restore their ruptured family. Ultimately, the German family is healed by the father's belated recognition of his paternal devotion and duties-a melodramatic finale that scored big at the box office and with critics and received official sanction as the year's best feature film.26

The cultural rehabilitation of German fathers was implicated in, and indeed helped to construct, a newly liberalized discourse of race in early 1950s West Germany. This symbiotic relationship was hardly fortuitous, but served to revamp both postwar German masculinity and national identity in particular, highly political ways.

In the popular 1952 West German feature film Toxin released the year that the first interracial occupation children were entering German schools, the "problem" of the postwar "Mischlingskind" arrives quite literally and unexpectedly on the doorstep of a German burgerliche family.27 Toxi's biological father is absent, having abandoned his child to return to the United States, and her mother is inexplicably dead, which leaves only her gravely ill maternal grandmother, who out of desperation sends the child to seek succor at the door of the middle-class home.

Notably, this film severed the fate of the child from the "fall" of the mother, shifting the focus away from the latter's sexual and racial transgressions. Thus Toxi is unburdened from the taint of the past national traumas, both military and moral. References to defeat and occupation are elided, since the sexually transgressive mother has mercifully disappeared. The racial problem was construed less as persistent than presentist and was purged of reference to the double pasts of National Socialism and the (later) loss of national sovereignty. Thus viewers were firmly encouraged to focus on the plight of the child, rather than the circumstances of conception. In the film, Toxi (played by an Afro-German girl, Elfie Fiegert) arrives in the middle of a birthday party, causing consternation and disrupting the familial celebration.zs The nature of her reception, however, fractures along generational lines. She is treated sympathetically by those characters whose formative generational experience pre- or postdated National Socialism; thus she is warmly received by the family's young children and by the aged grandfather, who cannot bring himself to fulfill his assigned task of putting her in an orphanage, insisting instead that she make her home with their extended family: Theodor, Grandpa's middle-aged son-in-law and the indifferent father of two young daughters, resents Toxi's presence and, when he is not busily pursuing business investments, strategizes to have the child removed from the house. The dramatic culmination comes when Grandpa suffers a heart attack, which prompts Theodor to take action. Early the next morning before anyone is up, Theodor awakens Toxi and readies her for the drive to the orphanage. On the way, however, his car breaks down, which allows Theodor and Toxi to get acquainted. Through a series of false moves, Toxi gets lost. Theodor gets worried, acquires a sense of social responsibility, and ultimately repents his prejudiced ways.

Thus, the film is explicitly about the need to strengthen the German family by weaning the German father from his unexamined racial prejudices. The implications are that eager and myopic pursuit of profit resulted in an insufficient liberalization of the paterfamilias and that the budding economic miracle led to a serious neglect of the social responsibilities of father and citizen, which demanded attention and address for the sake of the future of the West German family and nation. The film suggested that the German family and German identity would be healed only after their patriarchs confronted and conquered their residual racial prejudices. That having been done (amidst the self-congratulatory tears of white German moviegoers), the "functional" public purpose of the social problem of race was exhausted. Thus, the problem could disappear-or rather be transported back to the imaginary origins of its source.

At the end of the film, Toxi is accepted into the family, and the effacement of race is symbolically acted out in the family Christmas pageant, in which Theodor's white birth-child plays King of the Magi in blackface while Toxi performs in whiteface. The blurring of the color line, however, turns out to be no more than playacting. Indeed, the painted faces initiate a scene that reasserts racial boundaries (a point reinforced by the fact that the filmmakers felt the need to darken Elfie's light brown skin with makeup during the filming of the movie so it would not "appear too light").29 For at that very moment the narrative takes a dramatic turn, as Toxi's fashionable African American father arrives unexpectedly at the family's door to collect his child and take her "home" to the United States. In the film's last shot, the camera lingers on the emotional reunion of father and daughter, pulling in for a medium close-up that visually severs the pair from the German domestic scene, in effect initiating the unseen fantastic voyage that promises to restore the postwar German family and nation to whiteness. Thus, the normalization of postwar domestic life was scripted in a way that managed to bypass ideological associations with the Nazi past while nonetheless reaffirming race-based definitions of German identity.

Promotional literature for the film speculated that its tug on the audience's heartstrings would result in a sizable increase in adoptions for AfroGerman children, who were otherwise markedly shunned by most prospective adoptive parents in West Germany. Such adoptions did not, in fact, increase. Rather, the film had the opposite effect of facilely encouraging among its German viewers fantasies of repatriation as a solution to the "problem" of what to do with the living "legacies of the occupation." Into the late 1950s, moreover, educators, social workers, and West German officials argued for the need to give Afro-German children good educations and solid job training so they would have the option, on attaining majority, of emigrating to the land of their fathers.30

Despite the persistence of such racialist thinking in Germany after 1945, it would not best serve one's understanding to conclude too facilely that it was a direct extension of the Nazi variety of racism. For what Barbara Fields said of the United States during Reconstruction also holds for reconstructing Germany: "It is easy enough to demonstrate a substantial continuity in 'racial attitudes.' But doing so does not demonstrate a continuity of racial ideology.... Although there was no appreciable decline or mitigation of racialist thinking, there was a decisive shift in its character.""31 And, I would add, in its function.

A survey of official discourse and social policy toward Afro-German children reveals a parallel instrumentalization in discussions of race in Bonn. If the problem of race was used in the film to assist in reforming and reformulating German masculinity at the domestic level (and in the domestic arena), it was used by federal officials in the Interior, Family, and even Foreign Ministries to rehabilitate the (West) German nation at the international level.32

Since 1949, German federal and state officials consistently pointed out that, under the law, interracial children enjoyed the same rights and were treated in ways equal to their white counterparts; that there were no separate state-funded homes for black "Mischlinge" (although some privately operated ones did exist); and that they were educated in integrated, rather than segregated, school classrooms. The latter point was somewhat disingenuous for a number of reasons: first, because the small number and geographical dispersion of interracial children made segregated schools unlikely and, second, because despite the obvious difficulties, the option had been discussed by religious leaders, educators, and likely some state officials. To cite one of the more outrageous suggestions, the Protestant Inner Mission proposed to the Hessian Landrat that "Mischlinge" be educated in special segregated schools and afterward shipped to Africa to serve as Christian missionaries.33 Nonetheless, in 1952 there was a significant amount of self-celebration and backslapping among West German federal, state, and school officials for rejecting the socially divisive "American solution" of Jim Crow. In this case, the greatest public relations payoff was not so much on the domestic, but on the international level. At a time when the National Guard was needed to compel integration in the American South, the "frictionless" integration of West German schools was reported in white and black newspapers in places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and in a feature article in Ebony.34

Yet public pronouncements of the children's equality coexisted quite comfortably with racialist attitudes and the determination to scrutinize the social implications of the children's difference both for the West German present and-more alarmingly as the children approached puberty-for the West German future.35 Despite the liberal public rhetoric, officials in the federal Interior and Family Ministries could not quite shake the conviction that the children were "foreign" and, what is more, that military occupation had introduced into Germany a race problem of a type that had never before existed there.36 As a result, they actively encouraged having the "problem solved" by means of international adoptions, particularly to the United States where the children could be adopted by "their own kind." This was facilitated by a relaxing of the German adoption law in 1950. Within a few years, American demand for white German children of Allied paternity was extremely high, and German social workers, church, and government officials were heartened as queries from African American families trickled in expressing interest in black German children.

By 1955, however, as West Germany attained full sovereignty, the federal Interior and Family Ministries ordered the wholesale export of children to the United States stopped. Part of the reason for this reversal had to do with negative press coverage, which alleged that state youth offices were "selling" German children to the highest bidder-usually to well-off American couples who "ordered" children via expensive proxy adoptions rather than make the trip to select the son or daughter they were to nurture to adulthood. Grave concerns about the market mentality of Americans extending into the intimate sphere of the family were expressed by national leaders in German youth matters such as Heinrich Webler, director of the German Institute for Youth Guardianship. In May 1955, Webler published an article urging native youth officials to damp down on transatlantic adoptions. While he conceded in passing that some American adoptive parents acted out of a desire to help the children, he listed other "frequent" and much less admirable motives for adoptions, such as unwillingness to bear one's own children (a swipe at the putatively independent yet indolent modern American woman); desire for a tax break; and, more sinister yet, adoption with the intention of selling the child to a third party or even into indentured servitude. Webler, among others, argued that with the rapid improvement of the postwar German economy, the pressing material crisis that originally motivated foreign adoptions had disappeared, thus transforming "illegitimate occupation children" into a domestic problem requiring domestic solutions. As a result, occupation children previously considered foreign became recharacterized as "our German children."37

Many fewer Afro-German children than white German children were adopted to the United States, in part, as German youth and state officials complained, because "white American families would not adopt them" and "American officials made it clear that they didn't want them sent to their country" (an interesting story that cannot be told here). But some were adopted, and German social workers did not find the results encouraging. One child, who was referred to repeatedly in state, youth office, and federal memos, was said to have suffered severe psychological and emotional stress after being placed with an African American family. The problem was analyzed as twofold: first, the child's shock at, and inability to adjust to, the move from a white environment in West Germany to an all-black family and neighborhood; and second, the child's subjection to racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. As a result, the federal Interior, Family, and Foreign Ministries issued memos discouraging adoptions of "MischLinge" to the United States.3a And while they never convinced themselves that the children were unproblematically German, they at least decided that they were more European than American. As a result, the preferred destination for adoption of "Mischlingskinder" (since few German families were taking them) was Denmark, where, many German commentators assured the public and each other, "racial prejudice does not exist."39

By 1955, then, the West German state assumed the role of protector and beneficent guardian to the postwar "Mischlinge" The negative experiences that German youth offices collected and recorded regarding the adoption of Afro-German children to the United States were circulated and recirculated in federal and state ministry memos, German press reports, and to Christian welfare associations and international youth welfare organizations.40 While federal and state officials stopped short of engaging in explicit social criticism, they more than suggested that the United States had been tested-and found wanting-on the very principles with which it had come armed to reeducate and democratize Germany. As one sociologist publicly noted: "One shouldn't overlook the fact that even in the U.S.A. the professed ideal and the practiced reality are not always identical. The illusion that America is, among other things, also a paradise for colored people should not be nourished." In other words, as a local German newspaper more pithily and provocatively put it, "The USA prefers blondes."41 In one short decade after Hitler's defeat, a chastened nation seemed to have surpassed its tutor in the lessons of democracy; the West German government could claim moral victory on the issue of race and race relations.

If that message was circulated quietly in West German sociological literature and local press reports, it was nevertheless loud enough to carry across the Atlantic and appear periodically in the African American press. Given cold war conditions, however, West German federal officials understood that it would serve neither German nor Western interests to expose and irritate the Achilles heel of American race relations. Yet West German officials were not nearly as reticent when it came to attacking the failings of the American legal system, which, by appealing to the time-honored principles of personal liberty and privacy, allowed American men stationed in Germany to shirk their social responsibilities as fathers. In criticizing the situation, federal officials pointed out that while maintenance claims of German children against American fathers were nearly impossible to enforce, "such claims of [foreign-born] non-German children against fathers living in Germany may be enforced without difficulty. . including as an attachment of a [West German] soldier's pay." If a German man did not voluntarily perform his social duty, they argued during negotiations, he would be compelled to do so by the West German state.42

It is no coincidence that German soldiers got refashioned as responsible fathers at a 1956 conference on the status of military forces in postwar Germany. West Germany, the subtext goes, has become (and urges its new allies to be) a new-style Vaterland where "might" is tempered by "moral accountability"-and this, one suspects, precisely because of its postwar rather than wartime experience.43 But there is a second subtext here, which has to do with German sovereignty. For as long as the Federal Republic lacked the authority to command such accountability among foreign troops on its own territory, postwar conditions persisted, and German patriarchy still could not establish itself as domestic master.

Footnote:

The research for this article, and for the larger project from which it derives, was made possible by the generous support of the German Academic Exchange Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Colgate University Research Council, and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.

I "Protokoll der Arbeitstagung fiber das Schicksal der farbigen Mischlingskinder in Deutschland am 15. und 16. August 1952 im Amerika-Haus zu Wiesbaden" (proceedings of the conference sponsored by the Society for Christian and Jewish Cooperation [SCJC], Wiesbaden, 1952), 4. Founded in 1948 with much encouragement from the Office of Religious Affairs of the American military government in Germany, the society's goal was to "analyze and eliminate existing prejudices. . . and promote justice, understanding and cooperation between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews." The society's work was in line with the American reeducation program and devoted particular attention to problems of youth, education, teacher training, and curriculum reform for German schools. In 1952, the society became active in addressing "the race problem" in relation to interracial children. For a general discussion of the SCJC's activities in the early postwar period, see Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (Oxford and New York: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 1992), 310-11, and more generally, 310-34. That same year, a widely disseminated pamphlet titled Maxi, unser Ne,gerbub thematized German men's social responsibility in a story of a male teacher's concern for the successfuL social and educational integration of "his" Afro-German pupil. This pamphlet became recommended reading for all primary school teachers in West Germany at [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1998, vol. 24, no. 1] 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/99/2401-0005$02.00

Footnote:

the advice of state youth and welfare offices and ministries of education. See Alfons Simon, Maxi, unser Negerbub (Bremen, 1952).

2 A 1951 estimate of the total number of "occupation children" born to German mothers since 1945 was ninety-four thousand. By 1955, a federal survey concluded that births of Allied paternity for the decade 1945-55 numbered sixty-eight thousand. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK), B153: Bundesministerium fur Familien- und Jugendfragen, file 342, "Uneheliche Kinder von Besatzungsangehorigen." Also, BAK, B189: Bundesministerium fur Jugend und Familie, 6858, files "Besatzungs- u. Fluchtlingskinder" and "Besatzungs-, einschliesslich Mischlingskinderstatistik."

3 After 1945, the use of the term "Mischlinge" under-went a transformation. Earlier a designation for the children of so-called mixed unions between German Christians and Jews, or Africans, African Americans, Roma, or Sinti, it was now employed solely in reference to children of German women and African or African American men, and to a much lesser extent to those of Puerto Rican or Indonesian paternity. Nonetheless, by the 1950s such fine distinctions of paternity tended to be elided in official and public discourse. By 1952, when the first interracial children were entering German schools, "Mischlingskinder" were widely perceived as an unwelcome U.S. import.

4 The absurdly exaggerated second figure was uttered by Pater Leppich, as reported in Hermann Ebeling, "Berichte: Zum Problem der deutschen Mischlingskinder," Bildung und Erziehung 7, no. 10 (1954): 612-30. See also Office of the Military Government for Germany, U.S. (hereafter OMGUS), Land and Sector Offices, OMG-Bavaria, Civil Administrative Division, Public Welfare and DP Branch (CAD, PWDP), General Records, box 37: "Children of American Fathers" file. See also Luise Frankenstein, Soldatenkinder Die unehelichen Kinder auslandischer Soldaten mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Mischlinge (Munich, 1954), 5.

Footnote:

5 Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Elizabeth Heineman has explored the relationship between collective memory of women's experiences and the articulation of national identity in "The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's 'Crisis Years' and West German National Identity;""American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 354-95.

6 See, e.g., Annamarie Troger, "Between Rape and Prostitution: Survival Strategies and Chances of Emancipation for Berlin Women after World War II," trans. Joan Reutershan, in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change, ed. J. Friedlander et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 97-117; and Barbara Willenbacher, "Zerruttung und Bewahrung der Nachkriegs-Familie," in Von Stalin,grad zur Wahr#ngsreform, ed. M. Broszat et al. (Munich,1990), 595-618. See also my discussion in Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 92-117.

Footnote:

' Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

8 For a companion piece to this article that focuses on postwar public and official responses to German mothers and their interracial children, see Heide Fehrenbach, "Of Getman Mothers and 'Ns,,germischlinge': Race, Sex, and the Postwar Nation," in Revisiting the Miracle Years: West German Society from 1949 to 1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, N.J.: in press).

Footnote:

9 For a discussion of the historical development and meanings of Heimat in modern German history, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Confino, "The Nation as Local Metaphor," History and Memory 5, no. 1 ( 1993): 42-86, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). On the role of Heimafilm in the creation of postwar German identities, see Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 148-68; and Johannes von Moltke, "Trapped in America: The Americanization of the Trapp-Family, or 'Papas Kino' Revisited," German Studres RevXIX 3 (October 1996): 455-78.

Footnote:

*o Rudolf Albart, Die letzten und die ersten Tage: Bamberger Krigstagesbuch 1944/46 (Bamberg, 1953), 116-17, emphasis in original. See also the notorious local history of Freudenstadt, which depicts the day of defeat as a second visitation (likened to that after World War I) of marauding and murdering French Moroccan troops. The booklet ends with a list of Germans slain in the process, including brief details of German women abducted and killed by the troops, as well as German men done in trying to protect them. See Hans Rommel, Vor zehn Jahren. 16.-17. April 1945. Wie es zur Zerstorung von Freudenstadt,gekommen ist (Freudenstadt: Freudenstadter Heimatblatter Beiheft I, 1955). On the "black horror" stories of World War I, see Sally Marks, "Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice, and Prurience," European Studies Review 13 (1983): 297-334; and Keith L. Nelson, "The 'Black Horror on the Rhine': Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,"Journal of Modern History 42 (December 1970): 606-27, among others.

II This is also evident in archival sources. See, e.g., the statements of witnesses (as well as the women themselves) accompanying German women's application for abortion following alleged rape by an Allied soldier in Staatsarchiv Augsburg, Nummer 30: Gesundheitsamt Sonthofen.

Footnote:

12 "Rundschreiben" des Stuttgarter Oberkirchenrats, March 20, 1946. Quoted in Clemens Vollnhals, "Die Evangelische Kirche zwischen Traditionswahrung und Neuorientierung," in Broszat et al., eds., 151-52. This concern outlived the occupation. See my discussion of the furor provoked in state and church offices by the 1951 film Die Sundin, which thematized the failure of masculine will (Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 92-117).

Footnote:

13 These women were characterized in the press and by social workers and sociologists as asocials, mentally impaired, or as professional or informal prostitutes. This characterization persisted into the 1950s, although nearly one-third of German mothers of interracial children questioned in a survey at the beginning of the decade offered that their involvement with African American soldiers was motivated by love, and one-fifth of those questioned said they hoped to marry their partner. These percentages are likely low since it required substantial courage on a woman's part to make such admissions, given the unambiguously critical public assessment of interracial fraternization in postwar Germany at the time. See Herbert Hurka, "Die Mischlingskinder in Deutschland, Teil I: Ein Situationsbericht auf Grund bisheriger Vertfentlichungen,"Jugendwohl 37, no. 6 (1956): 213-21.

14 Applications for abortion followed a particular pattern; women's statements consistently described the use of overpowering force (through focus on the attacker's considerable size, weight, and strength, or the presence of a weapon) as well as the woman's frantic but failed attempts at physical resistance. See Staatsarchiv Augsburg, Nummer 30: Gesundheitsamt Sonthofen, memo from the Burgermeister des Marktes Sonthofen regarding "Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung," June 7, 1945. Atina Grossmann has noted that the relaxation of the abortion law in the case of rape after German defeat was anticipated by a similar relaxation announced by the Reich Ministry of the Interior in March 1945 in the case of rape of German women by advancing Soviet troops; see her "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers," October (Spring 1995): 56. See also Staatsarchiv

Footnote:

Augsburg, Nummer 30: Gesundheitsamt Sonthofen, memo of Reichsministerium des Innern, "Unterbrechung von Schwangerschaften,' March 14, 1945. For historical background, including interwar attempts to repeal Paragraph 218, see Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

15 These fears were expressed with force and frequency in Bavaria, and in 1947 the leadership of the Evangelical Church in Bavaria issued a position paper arguing against abortion in the case of either "miscegenation" or rape, in part because it could not be proved with certainty that the sexual relations were not consensual. Interestingly, then, concerns about national and racial sexual "transgressions" took a back seat to concerns about policing women's behavior. By 1950-51, Bavarian doctors were ordered to report all miscarriages so that officials could investigate whether the affected women were attempting to pass off an intentional abortion as an "act of God." See Staatsarchiv Augsburg, Gesundheitsamt, file 19: Neuberg, and file 91: Nordlingen. For a discussion of abortion policy in East Germany, see Donna Harsch, "Society, the State, and Abortion in East Germany, 1950-1972,"American Historical Review 102 (February 1997): 53-84.

16 Staatsarchiv Augsburg, Nummer 30: Gesundheitsamt Sonthofen, applications for abortions, 1945-46; and Gesundheitsamt (GA), Nummer 19: Neuburg. By mid-1946, German and American officials were constructing images of criminality linking African American troops and their white German mistresses. OMGUS, Executive Office, Office of the Adjutant General, General Correspondence, box 43, file: Incidents-American. For a more general

Footnote:

discussion of '4miliebchen" and "Ne,gerliebchen," see Elizabeth Heineman, "'Standing Alone': Single Women from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic" (doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1994), and "The Hour of the Woman" (n. 5 above); see also Maria Hohn, "GIs, Veronikas and Lucky Strikes: German Reactions to the American Military Presence in the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s" (doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996).

' RG260: OMGUS/Bavaria-CAD, PWDP, General Records, boxes 25 and 37. 18 E.g., Staatsarchiv Augsburg, VA Lindau, 1948. See also Siegfried Boschan, Die Vormundschaft (Cologne, 1956); Deutsches Institut fur Vormundschaftswesen, Neues Unehelichenrecht in Sicht (Heidelberg, 1961); Franziska Has, Das Verhltnis der unehelichen Eltern zu ihrem Kinde (Berlin, 1962); and Barbara Schadendorf, Uneheliche Kinder (Munich, 1964). For a historical survey of legal guardianship of children in Germany since the nineteenth century, see Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); for the post-1945 period, see Elizabeth Heineman, "Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic," Central European History 29, no. 1 (1996): 19-60.

Footnote:

19 In the American zone, this was due in large measure to American officers' reluctance or refusal to give their necessary permission to interracial marriage applications. Marriage between American soldiers and German women was officially permitted in 1947 but nevertheless continued to be officially discouraged and subject to the rigorous review and approval of one's superior officer and military chaplain. Marriage applications were further subject to the "six months and three" rule, which allowed a GI only a narrow temporal window of opportunity to petition to marry his German girlfriend. He had to have no more than six months and no fewer than three remaining in his tour of duty. After petitioning, he had to wait three months for approval, and then another five months (unofficially dubbed the "cooling off period;' by which time he would have returned home) before he would be permitted to import his fiancee for the nuptials. See OMGUS, circular 181.

zo For a comprehensive discussion of social policy toward women and the family in the Adenauer era, see Moeller, Protecting Motherhood (n. 5 above). 21 For a corrective to these misconceptions, see Vernon W. Stone, "German Baby Crop Left by Negro GIs," Survey 85 (November 1949): 579-83. See also Frankenstein (n. 4 above).

Footnote:

born between 1945 and 1955, 55 percent were of American paternity; moreover, among socalled occupation children born in 1954, this percentage had increased to 80 percent. See BAK, B189: Akten des Bundesministeriums air Jugend und Familie, 6858, 6859, 6861. See also Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (HStAStg), EA2/007, Akten des Innenministeriums BadenWurttemberg, Nummer 1177: "Jugendwohlfahrt: Statistik und Unterhalt der unehelich geborenen Kinder, 1951-55" And see especially, HStAStg, EA2/008, Akten des Innenministeriums, Nummer 1176, "Jugendwohlfahrt: Unterhalt air uneheliche KinderUnterhaltsverpflichtung von Mitgliedern ausl'ndischen Streitkrdfte (1955-70)." Complaints were also prevalent in Bavaria, see BayHStA, MInn 81087, "Verfolgung von Unterhaltsansprchen gegen Angeh6rige von auslandischen Streitkraften - Pariser Vertrage, 1955-57" See also Becker, "Die unter Vormundschaft stehenden unehelichen Kinder von Besatzungsangehorigen,"Jugendwohl 37, no. 12 (1956): 438-40.

24 As David Clay Large put it: "With its admission to NATO, Bonn was formally empowered.... But Germany's first soldiers, all volunteers, did not make their appearance for several more months, and then with such modest that it seemed as if they hoped to slink unnoticed onto the historical stage. This was indeed a low-profile army, one that appeared to be embarrassed by its very existence." See his Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 234. For a discussion of German masculinity in the 1950s, and especially the influence of American models of identification, see Kasper Maase, Bravo Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur der Bundesrepublik in den finfzi,ger Jahren (Hamburg: Jtmius,1992); see also the important work by Uta Poiger, "Rebels with a Cause? American Popular Culture, the 1956 Youth Riots, and New Conceptions of Masculinity in East and West Germany," in The American Impact on Postwar Germany ed. R. Pommerin (Providence, R.I.: 1995), American Culture, German Identities: Cold War Battles over Gender Race, and Nation, 1945-61 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, in press).

Footnote:

25 See the Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriften Literatur for 1947-59. While there are extensive entries for "Mutter" and "Mutterschaft" from the first postwar volume in 1947, entries for Vater" and "Vaterschaft" appear and expand only with the 1951 volume. Some samples from youth welfare and Christian publications are: "Kinder ohne Vater,"Jugendwohl 30 (1949); Hanns R. Muller-Schwefe, "Die Welt ohne Vater," Evangelische Welt VII, no. 17 (September 1, 1953): 497-500; and Joachim Bodamer, "Die Frage nach dem Vater," Christ und Welt VIII, no. 34 (August 25, 1955).

26 Das doppelte Lottchen (1950) was directed by Josef von Baky; the script was written by Erich Kastner, based on his book of the same name. For an analysis of the girlish femininity represented in this film, and its broader implications for West German cinema, spectatorship, and identity, see Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany (n. 6 above), 148-68. This was one of many West German films to appear throughout the decade dramatizing the need for new, more responsible and responsive German fathers. Other titles include Suchkind 312 (1955), Gefangene der Liebe ( 1955),Anders als du und ich ( 1957), Heimat deine Lieder (1959).

Footnote:

27 Tari (1952) was directed by R. A. Stemmle. Unlike Das doppelte Lottchen, this film received no state or federal film credits, although over 75 percent of all domestic feature films of the period did.

28 Elfie Fiegert won the part in a mass audition of four hundred children in Munich. In the marketing of the film, much was made of the parallels between Elfie's background and that of her character. In fact, in the film credits, the historical Elfie is literally reinscribed as her fictional counterpart: the character "Toxi" is listed as played by the actor "Toxi." As a result, the story of Toxi became the story of all West German "Mischlinge." Elfie's father was an African American soldier who was ordered to Korea; her mother was not dead, but she had placed the child in a home where she was later adopted by the Fiegerts, Fluchtlinge and former cinema owners from Schlesien, whose two-year-old daughter died on their arrival West after fleeing from Soviet troops and tanks. Thus this well-publicized story connected the integration of refugees and expellees to the integration of Afro-Germans in the Federal Republic. A more detailed and nuanced reading of the film will appear in my book, Race in German Reconstruction: African Ain Occupation Children and Postwar Discourses of Democracy, 1945-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).

Footnote:

29 Gunter Herbst, "Fun jahriges Negerkind spielt sein Schicksal,' Bonncrhnau (May 20, 1952).

Footnote:

30 BAK, B149: Bundesministerium flr Arbeit und Sozialordnung, no 8679. See also BayHStA, papers of the Bavarian Innenministerium, MInn 81084, "Frsorge fur Kinder ausl'ndischer V'ter, 1954-60" Letter from Dr. Rothe of the Bundesministerium des Innems, September 9, 1955. For a discussion of the mutating West German policies on international adoptions of "occupation children; see Fehrenbach, "Of German Mothers and 'Ne,gerrischlin,ge"'" (n. 8 above).

31 Barbara Fields, "Race and Ideology in American History," in Region, Race and Reconstruct/on, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 154.

Footnote:

32 By the mid-1950s, the nature of the children's significance had shifted and a number of German commentators began stressing the children's important social and pedagogical function in postwar Germany. They invested the children with the responsibility to reeducate Germans from notions of racial superiority, something they expected would both "unburden Germans from the guilt of the past and redeem the German name worldwide" In 1961, a West German lawyer made the outrageous comment that the "nonwhite" children should be cultivated in the Federal Republic as "a living warning (Mahnmal) of what the hubris of the Nazi state directly led to" (Minchner Merkur letter to the editor in response to an article published on "the problem of colored occupation children," April 22/23, 1961). See also Hurka (n. 13 above); and Gustav von Mann, "Zum Problem der farbigen Mischlingskinder in Deutschland,"Jugendwohl 36, no. 1 (1955): 50-53.

33 This proposal was rejected by American officials. See OMGUS, OMG-Hesse, CAD, Public Welfare Branch, box 1069, file: "Correspondence: Child and Youth Welfare," memo of conference with Regierungsrat Crueger on July 17, 1947.

34 The response of Bavarian state officials to inquiries by white American and African American journalists and academics can be found in BayHStA, Akten des Bayerischen Staatsministerium fir Unterricht und Kultur, MK62245: "Volksschulwesen Negerkinder."

Footnote:

as This extended to the federal level. See BAK, B149: Bundesministerium fir Arbeit und Sozialordnung, file 8679: Berufsberatung u. Vermittlung von Ausbildungsstellen fur unehelicher farbiger Besatzungskinder deutscher Staatsangehorigkeit. For an expanded discussion of this issue, see Fehrenbach, "Of German Mothers and 'Ne,germischlin,ge"' (n. 8 above). 36 They were not explicitly denying the racialist basis of the state-sponsored murders of millions during the Third Reich, they simply skirted that issue and suggested that this was the first time that Germany had to come to terms with the existence of a colored minority among its citizenship. This too was nonsense. See May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, trans. Anne V Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); and Lora Wildenthal, "Race, Gender and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). See also Reiner Pommerin, "Sterilisienf ng der Rheinland&astarde": Das Schicksal einer farbi,gen deutschen Minderheit, 1918-1937 (Dusseldorf, 1979); and Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, "Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-1960," in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, in press).

Footnote:

37 According to Webler, a domestic solution would also ensure the fiscal and physical health of the new West German state by helping to reverse the historical trend toward an increasingly aging population: "Our entire social welfare system is built upon the requirement that the young generation does not disappear." It is striking, then, that as the number of adoptions increased over the first half of the decade, suspicions regarding the reasons forand national implications of-this upswing also flourished. Nonetheless, it is notable that the children's race was rarely mentioned in these accounts, which indicates that authors were concerned primarily with the overseas adoption of white German children. Heinrich Webler, "Adoptions-Markt,"ZentralblattffirJugendrechtundJugendwohl42 (May 1955): 123-24. See also BAK, B 153: Bundesministerium fir Familien- und Jugendfragen, file 1335, I-II: "Material uber Probleme des Internationalen Adoptionsrechts; HStAStg, Akten des Innenministeriums, EA2/007: Vermittlung der Annahme an Kindesstatt," Band II, 1955-66, esp. the copy of the memo from the Internationaler Sozialdienst to the Bundesministerium fr Familienund Jugendfragen, January 27, 1958; Franz Klein, "Kinderhandel als strafbare Handlung," Jugendwohl, Heft 3 (1956): 95.

Footnote:

38 BAK, B153: Bundesministerium fir Familien- und Jugend&gen, file 1335; HStAStg, EA2/007, Summer 1750: "Vermittlung der Annahme an Kindesstatt-Allgemeines," Band II, 1955-66.

Footnote:

39 BAK, B189: Bundesministerium fur Jugend und Familie, no. 6862. Also Franz Klein, "Zur gegenwartige Situation der Auslandsadoption," Unsere Jugend, Heft 9 (1955): 401-8.

40 E.g., HStAStg EA2/007, Nummer 1750, "Vermittlung der Annahme an Kindesstatt," Band II, 1955-66: "Abschrift der Internationaler Sozialdienst, Bericht fiber Adoption deutscher Kinder dutch fremde Staatsangeh/rige," January 27, 1958.

41 This incipient double entendre was an ironic allusion to the recent German past, rather than American popular culture, since Marilyn's movie wouldn't be released until the following year. The first quote is from Herbert Hurka, "Die Mischlingskinder in Deutschland, Teil II,' Jg,gendwohl 37, no. 7/8 (1956): 275. The second is from an article on U.S. immigration and the new McCarran bill to ensure the "purity of the American race." See "Die USA bevorzugen 'Blonde;"Rheinische Post (July 24, 1952), press clipping in BAK, B- 106 Bundesministerium des Innern, file 20620.

Footnote:

42 HStAStg, EA2/008 Akten des Innenministeriums, Nummer 1176, Jugendwohlfahrt: Unterhalt fur uneheliche Kinder - Unterhaltsverpflichtung von Mitgliedern auslandischen Streitkrafte, 1955-70: German Delegation to the Status of Forces Conference, Bonn, April 18, 1956, memorandum submitted bv the German Delegation. While negotiations applied to all troops stationed on West German territory; it was clear that federal officials were aiming at the Americans. In a statistical survey, they determined that American troops were responsible for over half of all "soldiers' children"; moreover, when they solicited information from state offices on success rates for establishing paternity and securing maintenance claims, reports on experiences with American troops were specifically requested. Also in the same file, see "Amerikanische Vater zahlen nicht gern," an undated press clipping from an unnamed Mannheim newspaper, presumably from June or July 1957, judging from the context. And for Bavaria, see BayHStA, MInn 81094, "Statistische Erfassung der Besatzungskinder, 195261" For a discussion of the very low percentage of German fathers willing to provide child support for their wartime non-German offspring, see Frankenstein (n. 4 above).

43 The tendency to focus on postwar suffering rather than wartime aggressions was widespread. See Robert G. Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany;',"American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1008-48. For a critical analysis of filmmaker Helke Sander's recent "feminist" cinematic depiction of the period, see Gertrud Koch, "Blood, Sperm, and Tears," October 72 (Spring 1995): 27-41.

Author Affiliation:

History Department

Emory University

Copyright University of Chicago 1998
DESCRIPTORS: Men; Sex roles; Sociology; Politics; History; Nationalism
GEOGRAPHIC NAMES: Germany
SPECIAL FEATURES: References

TEXT: An official of Germany's biggest television network says the company plans to hire more non-Germans as on-camera personnel in an effort to increase acceptance of foreigners.

According to Reuters, Reinhard Graetz, a Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR) executive, told reporters there would also be more programs depicting the daily life of foreigners in Germany and educational slots to counter widespread neo-Nazi violence.

"Foreigners should appear as a natural part of the program," Graetz said, adding that his network sought to combat the spread of rightist ideology through programs that encouraged understanding and dispelled prejudice.

About 30 people have died in neo-Nazi and related racist violence since German unification in 1990. Critics have charged politicians and the media with spurring the violence by highlighting the rise in immigration to Germany following unification and a flood of refugees from the war in the former Yugoslavia.

There are only a handful of non-German celebrities regularly seen on television. Two of the best known are Ron Williams, a black American Army veteran-turned comedian and singer, and Cherno Jobatey, an AfroGerman host on the leading television morning program, ZDF Morganmagazin. THIS IS THE FULL TEXT: COPYRIGHT 1994 Cowles-SIMBA Information

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Review article: Walking targets

JOURNAL CODE: GMIZ
DOCUMENT TYPE: Feature
LANGUAGE: English

RECORD TYPE: Fulltext; Abstract WORD COUNT: 779

LENGTH: Medium (10-30 col inches)
ABSTRACT: In an excerpt from "Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out," Ellen Wiedenroth and May Opitz discuss the present situation in Germany concerning blacks. Women find themselves isolated, in search of identity and community in a culture gripped by growing xenophobia.

TEXT:

In 1984, while teaching at the Free University in Berlin, Audre Lorde sought out black German women, to learn their history, hear their stories, and explore similar and different experiences of the African diaspora. The daughters and granddaughters of Africans who came to Germany during the colonial era, as well as the offspring of African American soldiers, these women have been erased from German history. Third Reich policy included forced sterilization and/or concentration camp internment for many Germans of African descent--yet others were left unharmed and some were even granted privileges because their presence was needed in colonial films for "foreign policy advantages." Today, Afro-German (their term) women find themselves isolated, in search of identity and community in a culture gripped by growing xenophobia (see page 18). Their stories, shared during meetings with Lorde, form the basis for "Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, "first published in Germany (Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986).

ELLEN WIEDENROTH: I'm German, and I'm dark. But not all that dark, either. I've often looked in the mirror and asked myself what makes me so different in the eyes of others. Inside I am just German. And yet it was always made clear to me that that is exactly what I am not.

MAY OPITZ: At a meeting of Afro-Germans today someone was worried about security, because neo-Nazis might show up. Fear seems to be a central topic for many of us. With our color we are always visible. We're even different from children of binational relationships who are white. ELLEN: Fear blocks me from dealing with xenophobia. If I had more information than what you get every day, I'd be even more frightened. One suburb of Mainz is a neo-Nazi stronghold, where their national organization is based. So, sometimes I'm really afraid to be in Mainz. Ultimately, I feel helpless. We're walking targets. We can never "submerge." I can't ever "just walk around."

MAY: H. says that it used to be impossible for her to go outside without a mask; she always had to make up her eyes, polish her nails ... I always come back to these questions in reference to solidarity: How far do I want to go? Up to now I've never taken one of those jobs where they say, "No foreigners," even if I had the chance because of my German citizenship. But how long can I afford to do that? The same goes for the discotheques, when the sign says: "Off limits." That applies to blacks, but generally not to women. Usually I don't go to such dives, but how far does my friends' solidarity go? What's my position when my friends go anyway? And what are they saying to me when they do?

ELLEN: I once had a discussion with a friend about degrees of discrimination. She has problems with being fat and often perceives herself as unfeminine, because she doesn't fit a certain standard of beauty. People harass her, so she thinks she experiences discrimination just like I do. I think you can't compare [these discriminations] so easily and put them on the same level. There's so much mixed in together. When I add it all up it's unfathomable.

MAY: Sometimes my friends don't perceive me as black at all, and they often try to trivialize things that are important to me. For example, if I get upset over figures of speech like "Find yourself another Negro!" I'll get an appeasing "You're right," without their really reflecting on it. Then I feel like a little kid being patted on the head to pacify me. I'm really afraid of bumping into my friends' racism and into the inevitable question: Who are my friends actually? How far would they go for me?

ELLEN: That's why I'm friendly with so few people. I'm always prepared to keep my distance.

MAY: I'm skeptical, too, and prepared to be dropped. Before it gets to that point I usually pull back.

ELLEN: I have a mask. I give the appearance of going through life in full control. Sometimes I can actually feel myself, when I'm stepping out of the house, pull my shoulders back and take on a perfectly erect bearing. Walking through the street like that, I'm unapproachable. MAY: For a while I practiced walking erect, during my school days, when I felt I wasn't accepted. An erect bearing is a mask for us; this posture is supposed to be typically African.

ELLEN: Right, exactly; "we're born with it."

Excerpted with permission from Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, edited by May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz; translated by Anne V. Adams. Copyright (C) 1992 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Copyright Lang Communications, Inc. 1993


DESCRIPTORS: Blacks; Prejudice; Women; Ethnology; Culture; Self image; Race relations
NAMED PERSONS: Wiedenroth, Ellen; Opitz, May
GEOGRAPHIC NAMES: Germany

Review article: African trade unionists in solidarity with Ernst Thalmann AFRIKANISCHE GEWERKSCHAFTER SOLIDARISCH MIT ERNST THALMANN

Review article: "Diaspora: Tanzania",

[Reprinted from "African Diaspora and Culture," by Jamila Chipo Cushnie, in Sauti Ya Siti, Tanzanian women's quarterly, No. 14, 7/1991-9/1991.]

"Africa for Africans, at home and abroad" was a popular catchword of the early nineteen hundreds, coined by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican-born philosopher. He had a belief in seeing the people who were enslaved as free. He has left for posterity a legacy in terms of Black man's identity for all time on the pages of social science. His expressions are passwords in the struggle for liberation.

These expressions also became a slogan during the early seventies, when Black activists were fighting for freedom in America. Many of the Black people then began to dictate the terms from which they stood..."Say it loud, I am Black and I am proud." My teenage period revolved around this kind of dialogue.

Hurricane Hattie: I was born in Jamaica, not long after the most serious experience of the time, known as Hurricane Hattie. I began school when I was three, and it is still vivid in my memory. At seven I went to standard two at Trench Town Primary School. I used to be pushed into poetry and drama, and it has left its mark in my attitude to life. I loved this school; it was the best.

Later, a section of this school became Comprehensive. It was a little above secondary but upon finishing, one could move straight on to college. The area of Trench Town can be equated with Kinondoni District in Dar es Salaam. Some middle class people, although not exactly happy with the area, had no choice when it came to a choice of school...for Trench Town school excelled in all fields, especially sports. We won several cups.

This area of Kingston has been indelibly placed for posterity in the stories of music, through the popularity of the singer Bob Marley. Much of this area is like llala, Kariakoo, and Ubungo, and parts are like the area of Manzese. It is said that if one came from Trench Town, jobs and any opportunity for betterment will be scarce.

Because of such hardships, it seems people automatically strive for succeeding in whatever they do, whether they become a higgler (person who sells small portions of foodstuffs) or a civil servant. Scenes like vending hot coffee, roasted peanuts, boiled or fried potatoes and cassava, fried fish and roasted maize are very much a part of Caribbean life.

When I became a teenager, I was sent to England to join my mother, who was working there. I can say I hated the climate, the prejudice of the English, and the lack of opportunities during that period, but was encouraged by the way Black people there stuck together. Whether from the Caribbean or Africa, they rallied together to counter the hostile racism. But it was in England that I learnt most about where we of the West Indies originated from. The message of my roots, albeit my forebears who went via the middle passage into the new world...today called the Third World.

It is easy, therefore, to say, these Africans, who were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean because of the Colonial Masters quest to benefit for England, France, Belgium, Germany, etc., have been robbed of their culture. Any person in Jamaica will insist "Wiculcha inna wi." Pidgin English or Creole dialect translated means, our culture is within us. This is in spite of more than five hundred years during which they were enslaved up to a stage where they rebelled, fought the British, eventually chased them out of Jamaica, and gained independence in the sixties. A Jamaican will be at home in whichever part of Africa s/he chose to reside in.

With the extensive political/civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies, most Africans born abroad were able to salvage much of their portion of history to claim an identity. In my own quest to free my soul, liberate my mind, and return my spirit to the part of creation wherein I rightfully belong, I am appalled at how little Africans know about us. Likewise, how sparse is our own knowledge of Africa.

This was a deliberate tactic of the colonizers, to teach us all about Francis Drake, David Livingston, Marco Polo, and Christopher Columbus. We also were forced to know every river and mountain in Europe, but access to geography on Africa was denied us. We obtained diplomas on our sharp history pertaining to Mary Queen of Scots, but have not two sound names of any African kings or queens.

England, America and France made their prosperity out of the sweat of the cheap labour of African people. Coffee, sugar cane, bananas, aluminum, were found on the shores of the new world. While in Africa, it was gold, copper, uranium, ivory, cocoa, that to this day is being exploited. These are issues that the people now known as West Indians, and African-Americans are still disturbed about, while a trillion dollar debt hangs upon the Black people. Tanzania is among these.

Tanzania seemed to be the last place I would have chosen to settle because of the poor image it had in the mass media of Europe. It was portrayed as backward, poor, a destitute zone aping communism. When I came here in the mid-Eighties, there was an acute shortage of everything, and what was amazing was that people were able to live, put food on their plates, wear their outdated clothes and be content. I, too, joined the struggle to survive, looked at how best. I could assimilate in this culture, and create a space for my future.

I was happy when a few sisters began talking about forming a group for writers. This later came out as Tanzania Media Women Association (TAMWA). I have been writing since I lived in the UK for the ethnic press, and again in most English media here in Dar es Salaam under the name Chipo Cushnie. Although at the time there seemed to have been no organisations that were involved in "women's issues," I felt the required change would come about through TAMWA. Unlike the feminists of the West, I am not concerned with being anti-man. I am concerned with seeing women elevated to a higher level in this society.

As a Muslim woman, I also have a desire to see the role of muslimah regarded in the context that was designed for them through the tenets of this religion. I also want my children to grow up feeling positive about their sex, male or female. They may get negative vibrations, because of my being Jamaican-born, but at least I will strive to educate people that to have passed through the Diaspora never took my culture out of me.

[Reprinted with permission of Peoples Translation Service, P.O. Box 14431, Berkeley, Ca 94712; Tel: (510) 549-3505. Subscription rates are US$17/year; Canada and Mexico US$20/year; Overseas US$20 surface, US$35 airmail; institutional US$30.] [=]
DESCRIPTORS: Civil Rights; Cultural Relations; Education Policy; Ethnic Policy; Labor Market; North-South Relations; Multiculturalism; News Organizations; Sociology; Women; Women in Development; Womens Organizations; Education; Ethnic Boundries; Government; Human Rights; Business Services; Diplomatic Relations; International Relations; LDC; Less Developed Countries; News Syndicates; Social Sciences; South-North Relations; Third World

 

Review title: Proverbs as the Way to Understanding African Cultures
Sprichworter als Zugang zum Verstandnis von afrikanischen Kulturen

(16300); African Languages (00900); Phraseologisms (65450); German (27700)
IDENTIFIERS: secondary school intercultural curricula, African-language proverbs integration;
SECTION HEADINGS: lexicography/lexicology- lexicology (5211)

Review title: Traditions of African solidarity in the fight against imperialism TRADITIONEN DER AFRIKANISCHEN SOLIDARITAT IM KAMPF GEGEN DEN IMPERIALISMUS

Review title: Between localism and worldliness.

TEXT:

Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust (1992) is based on the epic tale of dislocation, migration, and acts of cultural survival forged under the despotic and inscrutable memory of slavery. Told on the eve of the migration of the Peasant family from Ibo Landing, in the Sea Islands of Georgia, this migration exemplifies that form of scattering and separation that bears portentous similarity to the context of many contemporary African artists. The presence of these artists in many parts of the world captures in manifold ways the reality of arrivals and departures that every day is played out in airport terminals, train stations, docks, etc., throughout the world. How has the language of these artists changed since migration? How have their identity, sense of place-lessness, or presence been altered by re/dislocation and how have they transformed the normative forms of expression in the sites they occupy? Does migration necessarily mean the leaving behind of one's own country, culture, and ethnic enclave, or does it involve other forms of traveling that mean more than the physical crossing of borders?

This last question is important if we consider how much things have changed in the last half century. The movement of populations--from rural to urban, agrarian to industrialized, national to postnational and transnational--provides keys to new articulations about the meanings of identity, identification, affiliation, allegiance. Introducing concepts of hybridity, ambivalence, and indeterminacy into the lingua franca of cultural and political discourse, these movements pry open routes into the values of ethnicity, origin, and authenticity. Such reroutings not only question but also unsettle allegiances and make clear sites of myriad political, cultural, social, and expressive thought, so that speaking of "black" Africa has become not only an inadequate point of classification and differentiation but anachronistic. In this regard, various discourses are beginning to recognize the validity of Maghrebian, Caucasian, and other histories as integral to the ways we define and expand the notion of who and what is African.

Thus in speaking of Africa today we need to ask how the struggles of independence, the problems of the national sovereign state, the expanding definition of national culture, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism (which are partially linked to economic malaise, social obsolescence, and political destabilization) define subjectivity. What role does the notion of individual freedom and desire play in the construction of identity? How do such definitions provide affective processes of critical thinking, radical revision, translation, and postnationality? These questions are urgent, for we must be able to account for new diasporic formations that have become part of the postcolonial experience of African artists and intellectuals. we need to investigate the cultural and intellectual productions based on this experience of diaspora, to explore how the conditions of exile and expatriation provide new motifs and challenges to the discourse of Africa in the late twentieth century. This investigation should contend not only with exile and expatration in relation to movement into the crowded metropolises of the Western hemisphere but also with the transnational movements occurring today in Lagos, Abidjan, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Cairo.

While movement and migration have been perpetual motifs of the twentieth century, and while many of us often fox on the problematics of dislocation and displacement, particularly those made through spatial distinctions between here and there, home and exile, we must not forget that vast numbers of migrations happen internally, within bounded national territories. Even when these movements happen internally, they are not always predicated on a shattered spatiality, in which particular kinds of migrants form clusters. These clusters, in addition to redefining the spatial character of the city, bring to those sites new cultural archetypes and languages that often compete with the rooted, settled communities.

Though these convergences often serve as metaphors for conflict, the realization of a new temporality within the spatial problematics of the city makes the process compelling. Thus it is possible to live in one's own country, city, and culture and remain as distinctly alienated and distant from its social procedures as those who journey to the strange beyond of the global metropolis. This minimally recognized condition of migrancy, placelessness, exile, and displacement serves as a metaphor for what today's contemporary African artists embody. They travel both at home and abroad, journey physically and psychically, migrate in between the pixelated and information-saturated sites of the cyber-world, and inhabit the complex matrices of popular culture that form part of the transterritorial dimension of the global network and exchange systems. They bring disparate attitudes and experiences to the zones where they trade (not only in symbolic exchanges), and they help to redefine and reshape the contours of contemporary cultural practice. These artists engage in critical conversation with the thorny issues of place, identity, and memory, which acquire new meaning insofar as they detotalize and deconstruct a performative African psychic space from a homogenized, political economy of race and authenticity to one of multiple identities.

In evoking some of the problematic terms that have served as cannon fodder for African identity discourse, I have no interest in repeating those worn-out modes of postcolonial address that insistently and invidiously set up binary distinctions within the practices of those African artists who live on the continent and those who don't. Nor am I interested in the other distinctions that separate their practices into native/foreign-born, authentic/inauthentic; in such small spaces nationalism, ethnocentrism, and racism circulate their noxious fumes. Still, it would be fair to concede that, indeed, certain differences do layer some of the above distinctions. However, singling out differences is helpful insofar as we understand that we can only deploy them to establish para-digmatic attitudes that exist between disciplines, discourses, locations, and practices.

The names of these artists are varied: Georges Adeagbo, Oladele Bamgboye, Bili Bidjocka, Mary Evans, Kendell Geers, Kay Hassan, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Abdoulaye Konate, Moshekwa Langa, Wageshi Mutu, Donald Odita, Olu Oguibe, Outtara, Peet Pienaar, Jo Ratcliff, Tracey Rose, Folake Shoga, Yinka Shonibare, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Ike Ude, etc. They come from Johannesburg, Douala, Lagos, Cotonou, Kinshasha, Cape Town, Aba, Nairobi, Bamako, and Dakar; and they live work in New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo.

These and other contemporary African artists work within many critical, avant-garde procedures: video, film, installation, actions, performances, photography, and digital technology. Though they do not eschew traditional means of making art, they are deeply located within conceptual and postmodernist matrices. Often based on the critique of various hegemonic social, political, and cultural practices, their works aim to destabilize, challenge, and reinscribe the global terrain of culture as a complex territory in which they can stake a claim as much as can any contemporary practice coming out of Great Britain, the United States, France, or Germany. In so doing they invoke and highlight many transgressive and subversive movements and critical and radical articulations.

Nonetheless, talking about these artists in this way does not give us a full picture of what it is to be an African artist in the age of globalization; all it says and repeats is what has always been known--that Africa is made up of multiple and disparate identities, cultures, territories. However, in following this most traditional of analytic routes, we are given a set of imperatives with which to examine what Homi Bhabha has termed "measure of dwelling," which speaks to how we define and determine belonging and place. What, in the late twentieth century, are the conditions of belonging and dwelling for Africans who live in places other than Africa?

I have repeatedly raised these issues because very few of the discussions about belonging, identity, nationality, and exile have adequately explored that hinge where many Africans dwell, think, create, or, in some cases, while away their time dreaming paradoxically of home. And where exactly is home for these people? And where home has become unimaginable except in old, tattered black-and-white photographs, what set of imperatives within the nascent narratives of crossing, settling, dwelling, and transterritorialization do such immigrants conjure up to locate themselves in the new land and to stitch the unruly patterns of home? How do they accommodate the locations of departure and arrival?

There are very few answers for such fraught questions, particularly when we focus on those expressive and social languages acquired in the temporal fissures of postcolonial migration. Making sense of the new temporalities and spatial configurations many Africans have entered into today--between what James Clifford calls localism and worldliness--cannot happen until we acquaint ourselves intimately with how African subjectivity has been defined within this reality. Moments of migration forged by contingent histories repeat through various signs, little bits and pieces or remembered conversations (articulations predicated on the falling away, the fragmentation of collective memory). Even while attempting to disguise those accidents of foreignness and hybridity--that exemplary piecing together, part myth and part experience--one easily slips between different forms of speech, from colloquial Igbo to clipped British stiff-upper-lip English; from classical Yoruba to Swahili to Arabic and Hindi. All these describe Africa, at home and abroad.

In such a moment of contingent, indeterminate cultural histories, one must question why few discourses of contemporary Africa have taken notice of these patterns and textures of migration and movement. First, the degree to which the patterns of migration have been figured seems always to narrate that liminal space as only a temporary one; hence, the need to define and forge a broader affiliation of Africans in a foreign place was seen as unnecessary, for one always returns. Second, many African immigrants who left before or during the period of independence never imagined that various political and economic emergencies could so easily attenuate the desire to return. Moreover, many found secure situations for themselves in the places they had settled and so those places became legitimate homes away from home.

If one pursues a more detailed picture of contemporary Africa in the late twentieth century, one finds that diaspora is not an equivocal term that excludes African artists. In its incremental and divergent formations, thinking about the links that diasporicity offers as tools to critically appraise the art of the continent does indeed give us access to the transcontinental and transnational regimes of the contemporary production of her artists. It short-circuits any essentialist reading of "African" as embedded in a timeless warp of precolonial African traditions. Clifford put it nicely when he wrote that diaspora could be "seen as potential subversions of nationality--ways of sustaining connections with more than one place while practicing nonabsolutist forms of citizenship." It seems to me that the terms under which we negotiate the sense of what is African in the late twentieth century are predicated on the values of this nonabsolutist, nonessential form of affiliation. The world of contemporary African artists is not circumscribed by any absolutist identity or territory. In this sense their work raises key questions not only for those who will have their views of what and who an African artist is, but equally for those critical Western establishments that will no doubt continue to attempt to sequester these artists into disqualified ethnic categories. But more important, these artists pose another, more salient and lasting, question. Like the Peasant family in Daughters of the Dust, as we cross and settle and resettle, how do the new accents we acquire during the course of migration or contact with other cultures change our positions of affiliation? How do we secure new communities, embody diverse identities, reterritorialize vestiges of the cultures of home, experiment with new ways of being and making, and create new economies of exchange and circulation for stories and symbolic and political values? Indeed, what are the ways one is and becomes African in the surging tumult and noise of the millennial clamor for a homogenized--and commodified--global identity?

Added material

This article is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition "cross/ing: Time.Space.Movement," organized by Olu Oguibe for the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of South Florida (1997), published by Smart Art Press, Santa Monica.

The artistic director of the Second Johnnesburg Biennale (1997), Okwui Enwezor is a curator and critic. He is the founding editor and publisher of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was recently appointed director of Documenta XI.

Cildo Meireles. Red Shift, 1967-84. Parts 1, 2, and 3. Each part, 394 X 197 (1000 X 500). Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust, 1992. Film still. c Kino International Corporation.
DESCRIPTORS: African artists; African diaspora

Review title: Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery

JOURNAL CODE: GHRV
DOCUMENT TYPE: Book Review-Mixed
LANGUAGE: English

RECORD TYPE: Fulltext; Abstract
WORD COUNT: 796
DIALOG(R)File 484:Periodical Abstracts Plustext (c) 1999 Bell & Howell. All rts. reserv. 03314972 SUPPLIER NUMBER: 97225615 (THIS IS THE FULLTEXT)
ABSTRACT:
Hall reviews "Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery" edited by Stephan Palmie.

TEXT:

STEPHAN Par.MIa, editor. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1995. Pp. xlvii, 283. $35.00.

Most historians in the United States are aware that interest in the African diaspora is growing as we transcend a Eurocentric model of American culture. We are perhaps less aware that interest in the African diaspora is growing in Europe as well. Immigration from the Anglophone Caribbean has inspired increasing attention to race and race relations in Britain. Massive immigration from Suriname to the Netherlands has sparked widening interest in the history and culture of the peoples of this former Dutch colony. Interest in race and race relations in global context is growing in Germany as that nation comes to grips with its Hitlerian past as well as with recent and current xenophobia among some sectors of its population.

This volume is based upon papers presented at a conference held at the Amerika-Institut of the University of Munich, Germany, in February 1993. The presenters were six historians, nine anthropologists, two scholars of literature, and one linguist. The chapters deal with colonial Louisiana, the antebellum and Reconstruction South of the United States, Jamaica, the Danish West Indies, Suriname, and the Gold Coast of West Africa, as well as providing a general discussion of slave resistance in the Caribbean.

Limitations of space permit me to focus on only the most salient issues raised in this volume. The presence of Sidney W. Mintz at this conference inspired much deference to his and Richard Price's The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1992). The very title of the book under review was to a great extent inspired by a major aspect of the Mintz-Price thesis: that Africans were so randomized and fragmented upon arrival in the Americas that identifying their specific African ethnic groups is unimportant. This is a huge generalization that is arrived at by collapsing time. According to this thesis, culture had to be created by the slave community within the context of a monopoly of power exercised by the masters through application of deep-structure, African grammatical principles that were elaborated by Melville J. Herskovits. The strongest, most original aspect of the Mintz-Price work-that African-American cultures formed very quickly-is not discussed in this volume.

Few of these chapters transcend the structuralist view that culture is created and enforced by institutions: an elitist, masculine, static view that has depreciated ethnography and blurred distinctions between anthropology and sociology during the past few decades. The only chapter that explicitly challenges this view is the very original and significant one by Ineke van Wetering, which deals with the role and religious culture of women migrants from Suriname to the Netherlands.

Daniel Usner's fine chapter on colonial Louisiana deals with interaction among Africans and Indians during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as state power and institutions evolved from extremely loose control to growing consolidation. U.U.E. Thoden van Velzen's extensive and intensive interviews with oral historians among the maroons of Suriname reveal an unusual historiography that is amazingly critical of great leaders. Jean Besson presents an insightful discussion of landholding and family structure in Jamaica. The two chapters dealing with the Danish West Indies, by Karen Fog Olwig and Gudrun Meier, focus to a great extent on the manuscripts of Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary who spent seventeen months in the Danish West Indies in 17671768. He carried out systematic interviews with slaves concerning their "African origins, their languages, physical anthropology, common illnesses, the plantation labor regime, the life of house slaves, patterns of kinship and marriage" (p. 67). Housed in the Central Archives of the Moravian Church in Germany, only intriguing selections from these interviews have been made available to the public thus far.

The two chapters by Richard Rathbone and Adam Jones concerning the Gold Coast of West Africa deal with the return of exported Africans as well as the role of women in slaveholding. Gert Oostindie and Alex Van Stripriaan deal with the impact of Suriname as a hydraulic society upon slavery and slave cultures there without considering even the possibility that at least some of the water control technology might have been transferred from Africa. (See, for example, Judith Carney, "Landscapes of Technology Transfer: Rice Cultivation and African Continuities," Techonology and Culture [1996].) Throughout the volume, it is assumed that all skills were taught by Europeans to Africans, while very often the reverse was true.

In sum, the volume is both informative and important. I hope, however, for a more critical view transcending Eurocentric biases that assume American culture was formed by British, Irish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and German ancesters while the African ethnic groups who made an enormous contribution to the culture of the Americas remain invisible.

Author Affiliation:
GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL Rutgers University
Copyright American Historical Association 1997
DESCRIPTORS: Nonfiction; History; Slavery; Black culture

HISTORICAL DISCUSSIONS P. 15- 22

Review title: Tele-Africa Revue

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Review title: Matatu; journal for African culture and society

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Concerned with all aspects of Black and African studies. Adv. Text in English, French, German

Review title: Africult

http://www.vpnet.at/handl/africa/
EDITOR: Ed. Haimo L. Handl
COUNTRY OF PUBLICATION: Austria (AU)
FIRST PUBLISHED: 1997
FREQUENCY: Monthly
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Covers news, vital data and essays on African affairs. Text in English, German, French and African languages

Review title: Africa Woman

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Review title: Association of Women's Clubs. News

Review title: African Woman

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Review title: The historiography of English-speaking Canada and the concept of diaspora: a sceptical appreciation.

TEXT:

Long before semiotics or deconstruction were invented, that great Victorian imagination, Lewis Carroll, had the most important issues sorted out:

`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of courge you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'(1)

Carroll understood that no single word means exactly the same thing to two different people, but that if we are to be masters of words, rather than mastered by them, the users of words must come as close as possible to a common agreement on what each of the building blocks of language actually means.

When the organizers of the Eighteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences chose to focus one of the three main discussion areas on `peoples in diaspora,' they were not planning for an international Tower of Babel, in which each person used `diaspora' in his or her own way, without regard for the sensibilities of other historians. `Diaspora,' presumably, had enough of a commonality of meaning to enable sensible persons of goodwill to reason together. And, when the editors of the Canadian Historical Review commissioned an article on the topic of Canadian historiography and the concept of diaspora, one which was to be `future oriented,' they were recognizing the existence of the concept as a historical tool, and were asking: Have we used it in the past, and can we, should we, and will we use it in the future? Those points granted, and despite my having employed the concept of diaspora as the organizing point of a monograph,(2) I think the concept of diaspora is one that should be approached with a fair degree of scepticism, as well as with an appreciation of its potential robustness.

Although Greek in linguistic origin, and roughly translatable as `dispersion,' `diaspora' has one specific and overpowering reference -- to the dispersal of the people whom we now call the Jews. `Thou shall be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth,' was Jahweh's word to the ancient Hebrews (Deuteronomy 28:5) and, if not the start of the diaspora, this certainly was its prescription. The diaspora was a two-staged affair. The first began with the downfall of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE after the destruction of the first temple of Jerusalem. The `Babylonian captivity' involved not only physical subordination, but, for many, dispersal to then-distant lands. The second stage of the diaspora, the one that has demonstrably direct ties to the world of the late twentieth century, was the dispersal of the Jewish population after 70 CE, when the second temple was destroyed. The diaspora came dose to being a worldwide dispersal, certainly greater in its geographic representation than that of any comparable group. The Jewish diaspora, in my judgment, is quite literally incomparable to any other in its most salient characteristics. Its duration is immense -- twenty to twenty-five centuries -- and yet over that period of time a sense of cultural identity (religious and ethnic) was maintained and a sacred language (Hebrew) was preserved, even when the primary and tertiary languages of the peoples of the diaspora were local dialects. Despite an immense range of regional forms of judaism, the sense of identity and of reverence for the sacred language was a constant. Further, the Jewish diaspora is not comparable to the dispersal of any group which has survived and maintained its identity in that the Jews took severe persecution over a longer period of time and still remained cohesive. The catalogue of human inhumanity to humanity is so great that this point may be supererogatory, but it does relate to the connotations of the word `diaspora' when used by non-Jewish groups. The successive persecution of the Jews, from classical times to Spain in the fifteenth century, to the Russian pogroms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the Holocaust, were operative over a time unparalleled for any comparable group. Moreover, the Jews have actually completed the circle that `diaspora' implies -- a return to a homeland; in this case, Israel. Far fewer than half the Jews in the world have residence in Israel, but the central point is that, since 1948, Israel has been a real, not a promised, homeland, a spiritual, ethnic, and national metropole, and the return to that homeland is real, not merely a matter of intention.

That is why, were we to be master of our vocabulary, `diaspora' would be a term limited only to the ancient Hebrews and their descendants, the modem Jews. To use the word `diaspora' even as a metaphor for other groups is to replace a precise connotation with a fuzzy one. Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, and a word that should be our servant threatens to become an irascible master.

The effective motive force for the expanded use of `diaspora' came from the field of Black studies. The first book to use the term `African diaspora' in its title was published in 1976. The editors of that volume, Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg, noted:

The application of the Greek word for dispersion, diaspora, to this process of Jewish migration from their homeland into all parts of the world not only created a term which could be applied to any other substantial and significant groups of migrants, but also provided a concept which could be used to interpret the experiences (often very bitter experiences) of other peoples who had been driven out of their native countries by forces similar to those which had dispersed the Jews: in particular, slavery and imperialism.(3)

This idea, that there were parallels between the Jews and Black Africans had been suggested, Kilson and Rotherg noted, as early as 1802 by the English author William Movor in a volume entitled The History of the Dispersion of the Jews, of Modern Egypt, and of the other African Nations, and had been taken up at several times during the nineteenth century by writers on Africa.(4) It was only during the 1960s, however, that the word `diaspora' began to enter the working vocabulary of Africanists and of historians of Black history worldwide. At the International Congress of African Historians held at University College, Dar-es-Salaam, in 1965, Joseph E. Harris and George Shepperson each gave papers in various aspects of the African diaspora. Shepperson's `The African Abroad, or the African Diaspora' was especially important, for it attempted simultaneously to indicate the breadth of the topic and to impose a significant limitation. The breadth came from an estimate Shepperson cited for the year 1946, that in the western hemisphere alone there were 41 million people of African descent. The limitation was this: `it must be emphasized that not all migration from Africa comes within the bounds of the concept of the African diaspora which is the study of a series of reactions to coercion, to the imposition of the economic and political rule of alien peoples in Africa, to slavery and imperialism.'(5) That limitation introduced a major problem into the study of the African diaspora: Should it involve only the study of those persons, and their descendants, who were forcibly moved from their African homeland? Work done in the 1970s and early 1980s emphasized the utility of the concept of diaspora, and, though it focused overwhelmingly on forced migration and its results, it left open the theoretical possibility of non-forced voluntary migration being of some consequence.(6)

Things changed sharply in the late 1980s, with the introduction of a strong feminist perspective(7) and with the increasing recognition of the magnitude of pre-slavery mobility of the African population and of the degree of voluntary migration since slave times. `A balanced appreciation of the Diaspora must note that many Africans were dispersed globally by choice' through adventure, long before Columbus went to the New World and inaugurated the trade in human cargo.'(8) And an immense amount of voluntary migration by Africans and persons of African descent had occurred since the ending of most forms of slavery. As Roy Bryce-Laporte forcibly argued: `With regards to Blacks, the term "diaspora" too often operates against the background of a yet pervasive but incorrect present-day orientation which presents them as a dominated, confined and immobile people in dosed, segregated conditions. But in fact, an important and understudied aspect of the Black Experience is the historical and ongoing geographical mobility of its people, which indeed carries us back to the very genesis.'(9)

If the concept of diaspora could be applied to the dispersal, both voluntary and involuntary, of the African peoples, it could also be employed by white groups, at least those whose cultural history included an epochal tragedy comparable to slavery. Thus, the `Armenian genocide' of 1915 becomes a fulcrum upon which the idea of an Armenian diaspora pivots. The exact extent of this displacement and slaughter of Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman empire is a matter of some controversy, but in the two decades before the First World War perhaps 200,000 Armenians were killed and, beginning in the spring of 1915, as many as a million were killed, deported, or simply scattered. The United States and Canada became their chief new homelands, but Armenians and their descendants are found all over the Middle East and Europe, as well as South Africa. The Armenians have maintained a strong cultural identity. As one generation has folded into another and yet another, the single motif that more than any other elicits loyalty is the genocide of 1915.(10)

Yet, must a group be as severely persecuted and oppressed as were the Jews, the Africans, and the Armenians in order for `diaspora' to be applicable? Apparently not. Take three examples. The first of these is the phenomenon known as the `Sikh diaspora,' a process that has been in train for at least a century. The heartland of this diaspora, the Punjab, today holds roughly one-third of the world's population of 13 to i6 million Sikhs. Although far from wealthy in their homeland, the Sikh diaspora has no mythic event equivalent to slavery or the Holocaust in its story. The Sikhs migrated worldwide, by choice, and with considerable economic and social acumen. They have been particularly effective in filling middle-class roles in places where the pluralist societies that evolved under British hegemony occurred -- ranging from the Malay Peninsula, to East Africa, to Canada.(11) A second diaspora, that of the Chinese, is of major proportions statistically and culturally, but it too arose not out of systemic oppression but from the prudent calculations of opportunity by several million individuals. The number of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia alone is roughly 15 million, and when one adds the uncounted (and probably statistically uncountable) ethnic Chinese in the western Indian Ocean and in North America, one is probably dealing with a total ethnic Chinese diaspora that is larger than the entire population of Canada.(12) A third diaspora, that of the Koreans in the last half-century, is particularly notable in North America, especially the United States. This population movement occurred after, rather than during, the fearful oppression the Koreans experienced at the hands of the Japanese. It was the removal of the bonds of Japanese imperialism, rather than its experience, that permitted large-scale Korean migration. The Korean emigres to the United States have been particularly successful entrepreneurs, first as small business persons and, increasingly, as large-scale venture capitalists.(13)

The point about the diasporas of the Sikhs, the Chinese, and the Koreans is that they force one either to say that, no, these are not true diasporas, since they did not occur as the direct result of extensive oppression, but were largely voluntary migrations; or that, yes, these are indeed instances of true diasporas. To choose the first alternative is to exclude from our purview some of the most important population movements of the past century, and to do so on the grounds of perceived pain -- that is to say that unless some quantum level of social oppression were experienced, the phenomenon is not worth study as a diaspora. That, besides being operationally impracticable (Who is to say how much `oppression' is sufficient to qualify?), would lead to inane contests in relative victimhood (`My group suffered more than yours, so my group is a true diaspora, yours is not').

So, one admits the Chinese, the Sikhs, the Koreans, and similar groups to the collective umbrella. But where does one stop? The term `diaspora' threatens to become a massive linguistic weed. One can find, for example, serious studies on aspects of the Russian diaspora,(14) the Greek diaspora,(15) and even the Cornish diaspora.(16) What does the term diaspora exclude?

One attempt at an efficient mode of sorting out a diaspora from related, but supposedly distinct, phenomena has been put forward by William Safran. A diaspora community, he postulates, will share some of these characteristics:

1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original `centre' to two or more `peripheral,' or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland -- its physical location, history, and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not -- and perhaps cannot be -- fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return -- when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.(17)

Constructive as this attempt is, it raises some obvious problems. The use of the passive voice in Safran's first point (`they or their ancestors, have been dispersed') seems to exclude the cases, such as the Chinese, wherein the dispersal was volitional and active. The third point, which postulates some form of perpetual alienation from new homelands, places a priori restrictions on the historical process by precluding the possibility that a diaspora community may evolve from a feeling of alienation towards one of affiliation with the host society. The fourth and fifth points, concerning diaspora communities having an ideal homeland to which they wish to return, excludes the African diaspora, most of whose members have not the slightest inclination to return to their ancestral continent.

Another attempt at defining `diaspora' was put forward by Gabriel Sheffer as part of a pioneering volume, Modern Diasporas in International Politics (1986). As the basis of this collective work, the following definition was employed:

Ethnic diasporas are created either by voluntary migration (e.g., Turks to West Germany) or as a result of expulsion from the homeland (e.g., the Jews and the Palestinians) and settlement in one or more host countries. In these host countries the diasporas remain minority groups (the Anglo-Saxon segment in Canada for example will therefore be excluded from the present study). In their host countries diasporas preserve their ethnic, or ethnic-religious identity and communal solidarity. This solidarity serves as the basis for maintaining and promoting constant contacts among the diasporas' activist elements. These contacts have political, economic, social and cultural significance for the diasporas, their host countries and homelands. This is also the basis for the organized actions of the diasporas. one of the purposes of these actions is to create and increase the readiness and ability of the diasporas to preserve a continuous interest in, and cultural, economic and political exchangeg with their homelands. Organized diasporas deal with various aspects of their cultural, social, economic and political needs in a way that either complements or conflicts with the activities of the host government. The emergence of diaspora organizations provides the potential for conflicting pressures and for the development of dual authority and dual loyalty patterns and problems. In order to avoid undesirable conflicts with the norms or laws established by the dominant group in their host countries, the diasporas accept certain rules of the game of these countries. At certain periods, however, real or alleged dual loyalties which are generated by the dual authority patterns may create tension between elements in the host country and the diaspora. This sometimes leads to the intervention of homelands on behalf of their diasporas, or in the affairs of the diasporas themselves. And finally, and most importantly, the capability of diasporas to mobilize in order to promote or defend their interests or the interests of their homelands within their host countries will result in the formation of either conflictual or cooperative triadic networks involving homeland, diaspora and host country. These triadic relations are now an integral part of international politics and influence the behaviour of all parties involved.(18)

The Canadian historian who would find that definition useful (even if he or she were willing to parse the shambolic syntax) is hard to conjure. Aside from the exclusion of the `Anglo-Saxon segment in Canada,' whatever that might be, the definition's emphasis upon a diaspora group necessarily having minority status precludes the concept of diaspora from applying to cases wherein floods of migrants rapidly outnumber the indigene. In this way, the early history of the Europeanization of North and South America and of Australia is totally excluded from consideration.

Should historians of English-speaking Canada ignore the concept of diaspora, as being an irrelevance to our society? If `diaspora' as a historical construct were limited to the two attempts at normative definitions I have just quoted, then, yes. However, in practice as distinct from paradigm, `diaspora' has wide application. For example, the journal Diaspora (which, not incidentally, is funded by Armenian philanthropists), ranges widely, dealing with topics that run from the `Huguenot diaspora' to musical and literary forms as artifacts of diaspora. Further, in 1993, UCL Press (the reincarnation of the University of London Press), announced a major series of books, `World Diasporas,' under the general editorship of Robin Cohen. This series will include volumes on overseas Indians, Greeks, Poles, Armenians, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainians, Irish, Jews, Africans, Palestinians, Sikhs, and Caribbean peoples. That purview is so wide as to permit application even to facets of English-Canadian society.

The term `diasporas' may be a stimulus to Canadian historians if -- and this is a big if -- it can be scrubbed of a subtext that runs through much of the thinking about diasporas: a historical presentism and a smarmily righteous tone. Specifically, the overwhelming bulk of the international literature on diasporas (other than the Jewish diaspora) deal in depth only with the twentieth century. This focus not only limits the concept's usefulness, but it allows a good deal of moral side-stepping. By looking only at the present century, diaspora groups are seen as minorities, and thus inevitably as potential victims, never as victimizers. Yet, in fact, diaspora groups often have totally displaced, oppressed, or enslaved the indigenous peoples they have encountered. This phenomenon was more prevalent between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it continues to this day in parts of South America and Polynesia. Indeed, even if one focuses on the diaspora groups which in the twentieth century were minorities within various societies, their minority status should not obviate the fact that by the very act of participating in the economic and social life of their new lands, they frequently were playing a part in the various imperialisms that the present century has fostered.

The real attractiveness of the concept of diaspora to historians of English-speaking Canada is that, in fact, it is nothing new. Rather, it is a fresh use of tools we already have to hand -- concepts of ethnicity, population movement, in- and out-migration, social mobility, multiple cultural identities, popular culture, religious affiliations, ideological constructs -- nothing new, but applied in a much broader context. Potentially, `diaspora' allows us to escape the tyranny of the nation-state. Instead of depicting the history of English-speaking Canada within the context of the geopolitical construct called Canada (a useful perspective, but a very limiting one), the concept of diaspora allows an entirely new set of viewpoints. Like a histologist's changing his or her plane of incision, we can gain new insight by altering our angle of vision. For example, instead of perceiving post-1945 Italian immigrants to Toronto solely in terms of their actions within Canadian society (a useful viewpoint, to be sure), they should also be perceived as part of an international web of migrants that included cousins in Buenos Aires, brothers and sisters in Brisbane, and still others in Italy itself. The lives of these citizens of Canada cannot be adequately understood if one sees them solely as being Canadian: they operated with an international cultural network that was literally world-circling. That same thing holds, mutatis mutandis, for other groups and for other periods of history.

The word `diaspora' is not much found in the historiography of English-speaking Canada. (One insists on the term `English-speaking' Canada, rather than `English Canada,' for it is important not to confuse cultural hegemony with ethnic origin, and especially not in any discussion of the concept of diaspora.

My own book on the Irish diaspora (1993) is the only scholarly item by a single author on any diaspora that I can find -- and though it is not held up as a model, its existence should be noted. There are also multiauthored publications, the best of which originated with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario under the directorship of Robert F. Harney. The two volumes on the Finnish diaspora, edited by Michael G. Kami (1981), are excellent. The scholarship is sound, and the authors, whose work spans several continents, are held together by a tight definition of the group they are studying.(19) Unlike many multi-authored collections, this is a coherent book, and it should serve as a model for other similar ventures. Slightly less successful, because of its loose definition of the group being studied, is The South Asian Diaspora in Canada: Six Essays (1987). Despite the focus on Canada implied in the book's title, this set of essays is international in coverage.(20) The one diaspora actually to originate in Canada is discussed in the collection, The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America (1982).(21) To these three multi-authored items, one should add the papers of the Conference on the Hellenic Diaspora in Montreal in 1988, edited by John M. Forsey.(22)

That is not a large literature. Even accepting that there are additional fugitive items (so fugitive that they are essentially unknown to the Canadian historical community), this is a literature so tiny that one has to ask: Are the historians of English-speaking Canada completely out of step with the world historical community, which has denominated diasporas as one of the three central concerns of the mid-1990s? Perhaps, but not nearly as much as a survey of the literature would at first imply. In fact, I think, the Canadian situation is in line with several fundamental realities and is not at all anomalous.

To understand, one must emphasize an absolutely pivotal proposition: diaspora histories, if they are not merely to use the word `diaspora' as a flag of convenience, must be multipolar. They must deal with the homeland and with two or more countries of reception. Otherwise, one is not studying diaspora, but simple migration from one point to another, something quite different. Diaspora means multidirectional dispersal, not mere transfer from one country to another. That being the case, why should one expect much of a literature on diasporas to originate in Canada? Or in any specific country? Instead of enquiring solely, `What has English-speaking Canadian historiography contributed to the study of diasporas?' one should equally be asking, `What has the study of diasporas contributed to the historiography of English-speaking Canada?' The second query highlights the important work, for example, of James W. St. G. Walker, whose framework for the study of the Blacks in Canada was laid down in his early contribution to collective studies of the Black diaspora worldwide.(23) Similarly, the work of Norman Buchignani, Doreen Marie Indra, and James Chadney on the Sikhs in Canada, originally developed as part of an international collaboration on the Sikh diaspora worldwide, has considerable salience for historians of English-speaking Canada.(24) So, in fact, the interaction of the historians of English-speaking Canada with the concept of international diasporas is somewhat greater than at first appears. That said, the intersection is fairly rare.

But this scarcity fits another set of realities: the historical literature on diasporas is extremely scattered and difficult of access. Frequently, it is published by small firms that have virtually no commercial distribution network. Often, the distribution is within the same diaspora group whose history is being chronicled, with the result that persons outside that particular group are not advised of the existence of studies that might be relevant to (in this case) the historiography of English-speaking Canada. A related reality -- one which the hopeful tone of the Eighteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences is apt to disguise -- is that the historical literature on non-Jewish diasporas is very thin as yet.

As a concept in political science, diaspora is coming into fashion (as a means of referring to certain refugee populations, chiefly), but, as my initial survey of the diaspora literature made clear, the idea is just too new for there to be much real historical literature.

That this will change quickly, I doubt, and on this matter the Canadian historical profession again is in synchrony with some fundamental realities, ones that operate worldwide. Simply put, the industrial sociology of the historical profession, in Canada and virtually everywhere else in the Western world, militates strongly against the development of diaspora histories.

In terms of labour process, there are only two sorts of diaspora histories, those done collaboratively and those done by individuals. Consider the first, the more common sort. Governments and universities are asked to fund research, international colloquia, and publication of work that -- almost by definition, if they are real diaspora histories -- deals chiefly with some other nation and is conducted mostly by scholars from some other country. Governments resist such a prospect. In the Canadian case, the resistance is explicit. As a result of federal cutbacks, the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme will only in the rarest of events fund a collaborative publication if a majority of its authors is non-Canadian; and, in fact, the ASPP now funds collaborative projects, even if all-Canadian, only very infrequently. And consider the second form of diaspora scholarship, that done by individuals. It is very expensive in terms of funds (extensive research abroad is always required), in terms of time (few foreign archives have the easy accessibility of Canadian federal and provincial archives), and the payoff is slow. It takes decades for a scholar to become competent in several national histories. And the final results are easily misunderstood: historians trained in national histories rarely know how to read international histories. So any young Canadian historian of English-speaking Canada who prudently considers his or her future would do well to avoid diaspora history, in favour of the quicker results and surer rewards of staying with the national history. This scenario holds not just for English-speaking Canada, but for that of every Western nation with which I am acquainted. The safe route is to be a local hero.

But here let us suspend disbelief and ask how, in English-speaking Canada, the historical profession could develop as part of a worldwide matrix of diaspora studies?

The efficient method would be to build on the platform of bipolar studies which already exist, and which can efficiently become part of a truly multipolar diaspora literature. The historical literature of English-speaking Canada contains a considerable quantity of good quality 'ethnic history' -- as well as a lot of truly terrible ethnic piety. Ethnic history of any decent scholarly standard requires an expertise in at least two societies (the home country and the receiving society), and thus is potentially part of an international matrix that has its common term, the homeland, wherever that may be. There are literally thousands of articles and monographs in the field of Canadian ethnic history, but they have been organized into four major entries, each of which is easily accessible. First, there is the old `generations' series, published by McClelland and Stewart in the 1960s and 1970s. With the exception of Henry Radecki's volume on the Poles, the series was an embarrassment, the sort of serial vaunting of one group after another that turns serious historians away from the field.(25) Second, Canadian Ethnic Studies, from its foundation as a mimeographed newsletter in 1969, has grown into a professional forum of high standard. Because the journal is a shared platform for political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as historians, its general tone focuses on the present and the recent past. However, under the long-time editorship of Anthony W. Rasporich, it regularly produces historical articles that scholars of English-speaking Canada ignore only to their own loss.(26) Third, the publications of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario have covered a wide range. Beginning with the appointment of Robert Harney as director in 1976, the society pursued a dual strategy: it played the ethnic political game by publishing nonscholarly, self-congratulatory popular items that each recent ethnic group wanted to read, and simultaneously it organized and published some high-quality scholarly work. The historical facet of this work focused chiefly on the period after the Second World War. The fourth series, McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History, has consciously departed from the concentration on recent ethnic history and has published several books that deal with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Implicit in this effort has been an attempt to show that the concept of ethnicity has a considerable payoff when applied to groups other than those traditionally denominated as `ethnic.'(27) Taken together, Canadian Ethnic Studies, the scholarly segment of the work of the Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario, and the McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History provide a solid starting point for Canadian historians who might wish to enter the field of diaspora studies.

Where such scholars will find scant help is from the Canadian multicultural industry. This is not to condemn multiculturalism, which is a valid political concept, a particular ideology of how the world should operate. Multiculturalism, however, being normative, is inherently inimicable to scholarship; and being presentist and futurist in its orientation, it is inherently anti-historical. The policy at a national level was an outgrowth of the reaction to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was appointed in July 1963. Among the sidebars of that report was the recognition that many groups, of neither French nor British Isles ancestry, although willing to accept that Canada was to be a country with two official languages, did not accept the idea that there should be only two official cultures. These were groups that were growing quickly and that increasingly represented pivotal blocks of voters, especially in large urban centres. Thus, on 8 October 1971, Pierre Elliott Trudeau tabled a policy statement promising federal support for multicultural activities. The opposition parties accepted the principle, and a program of subventions for various `ethnic' activities began, one that is still emerging.(28) As Leslie Pal's recent study has shown, from the very beginning the multicultural largesse was given in largest part to those ethnic groups that had the most political muscle (Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Italians, and African Canadians), and that the biggest sector of the budget was for public circuses, in the form of `folk arts.' Writing, publications, and ethnic studies received, and still receive, a small proportion of the multiculturalism budget, and most of this work is celebratory and, implicitly, political.(29) Some crumbs have fallen off the table for serious work, and a tiny proportion has gone to ethnic history of an acceptable scholarly standard.(30)

None of this would be inappropriate -- politicians, after all, are paid to give the voters what they want -- were it not that the multiculturalism industry has turned into an enormous propaganda machine that has promoted two points of historical misrepresentation. The first is the concept, sometimes clearly articulated but usually left implicit, that English-speaking Canada is a congerie of ethnic groups. This elides the central historical fact that in Canadian history a process occurred -- `nation-building,' to use an old term -- that created a central set of political, social, legal, and cultural conventions within which all the allegedly separate multicultural groups operate. The second is the acceptance of a curious sort of historical asymmetry -- that the `multicultural groups' (a code phrase for the more recent immigrants and African Canadians) have cultural affinities to the world outside Canada, but that, somehow, those groups which were in large part here before the Second World War (and which are frequently given the code slur of `Anglos' or `Anglo-Saxons') are a homogeneous lump, lacking ethnic ties and cultural traditions, and having the presumed vices of being both non-indigenous and non-ethnic.(31)

At this point the concept of diaspora can help, for it permits one to relate various ethnic diasporas one to another while establishing facts of chronological priority and cultural hegemony. It can help historians to remember (and to remember to explain to the general public) that English-speaking Canada from the late eighteenth century onward was a European society, and one of a very specific sort -- a direct product of the massive British Isles diaspora of the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries. It is very important that this diaspora not be mislabelled. It consisted of people who were anglicized but, most emphatically, were not necessarily English. It consisted of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and English persons. One can denominate these persons as being either of `British Isles origin' or (in the increasingly accepted international usage) as `Anglo-Celtic.' The crucial point is not to confuse this ethnic and cultural amalgam with the `English,' or even the `British,' despite such terms having been used extensively by contemporaries.

As Peter Lyon documents in his essay on the British Isles diaspora, the historians of the phenomenon have used the concept little, even though they have discussed it extensively under other names. Charles Carrington, in The British Overseas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1950), talked of the dispersion of the `British race' from the `British Isles,' an unfortunate confusion of Great Britain and the entire archipelago, but a clear usage nonetheless. Reginald Coupland, in Welsh and Scottish Nationalism: A Study (London: Collins 1954), included a chapter on the Scottish diaspora. J.G.A. Pocock, in a provocative article, `British History: A Plea for a New Subject,' in the Journal of Modern History (vol. 47, December 1975), argued that British history should be seen as an international phenomenon, similar to a cultural star cluster dispersed all over adjacent galaxies.(32)

In 1982 the University of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies put together a set of seminar papers on the British diaspora, which included papers by Peter Burroughs, A. Ross McCormack, and P.G. Wigley, all of which bore directly on Canadian matters. However, the collection as a whole was a mass of contradictions, because the organizers never decided if the so-called British diaspora was solely an English matter, or if it included the Scots, and, if so, did it include the Irish as well? Despite this effort, the concept has not caught on. To some extent, its neglect is a function of a larger phenomenon in history as practised in the British Isles: a retreat from an even passing recognition that what was once the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the head-centre of a massive imperialism, unprecedented and as yet unmatched in human history. As Phillip Buckner noted in his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in June 1993:

Since the 1960s, historians of the second British empire have largely lost interest in issues of imperial policy-making and in the colonies of settlement. With the Empire gone, these themes no longer seem as important as they once did and imperial historians have been seeking to redefine their field in ways that would give it continuing relevance. Unfortunately, in the process of what David Fieldhouse described as the problem of putting Humpty-Dumpty together again, they have left some of the pieces out.(33)

So, if the history of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora is to be written, it will probably be done by historians of the countries that the diaspora most affected: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States of America.(34)

The necessity for the historians of English-speaking Canada to be deeply involved in this international task is easily indicated by two sets of figures. Table 1 shows the proportion of the total Canadian population formed by persons of Anglo-Celtic ethnicity in the first century of Confederation:(35) In fact, these figures understate the importance of British Isles ethnicity in English-speaking Canada. If one factors out Quebec, it is clear that from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day, at least half (and in most time periods, the majority) of the population of what is colloquially defined as English-speaking Canada has been of British Isles origins. This fact implies a simple conclusion: that to write the history of English-speaking Canada without taking into account the full dimension and character of the British Isles diaspora is a form of forgetfulness so deep as to be pathological, and a prelude to an irreversible form of cultural amnesia.

TABLE 1

Persons of Anglo-Celtic Ethnicity in Canada, 1871-1961
Year / Per cent
1871 - 60.6
1881 - 58.8
1901 - 57.0
1911 - 55.5
1921 - 55.4
1931 - 51.6
1941 - 49.7
1951 - 47.9
1961 - 43.8

If, as an antidote to this amnesia, we are to employ the concept of the Anglo-Celtic (or British Isles) diaspora, three desiderata must be honoured: those of reciprocity, multipolarity, and texture. Take the first. The Anglo-Celtic diaspora must be understood in historiographic terms, not merely as a concept that helps to explain many phenomena in Canadian history, but, simultaneously, as one that helps to explain significant phenomena in the home archipelago. To use a simple example from the Irish segment of the great British Isles out-migration: the fact that in 1891 close to 40 per cent of persons born in Ireland were living elsewhere means that anyone asking fundamental questions about the nature of Irish culture and society in the Victorian era perforce has to study how those persons born in Ireland behaved in their several new homelands. This holds for all the British Isles groups. The persons who left must be included in the history of the homeland, and not merely as so many disappearing ciphers. In parody, but with real insight, Noel Coward recognized that to understand an Englishman, one had to observe him far from home, out in the midday sun.

Second, to repeat the need for multipolarity may seem otiose, but the collective egocentricity that has characterized the historiography of English-speaking Canada over the past generation can be cured. (It is egocentricity, not parochialism and not fear; for in fact the profession is remarkably self-confident, often to the point of hubris.) Like a great myopic caterpillar, we have moved over the shrub that is our past, masticating our way endlessly forward, rarely stepping back to figure out what sort of a home we live in, or even to note that there are other, related flora in the forest. It is a matter of some marvel that the history of English-speaking Canada is neither taught nor written with reference to the closely comparable cases that exist worldwide. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are prime examples of colonies of settlement that emerged as part of the second British Isles empire. The ethnic composition of the non-indigenous portions of these three nations has been remarkably similar virtually throughout their histories, their governmental structures similar, their cultural evolution parallel. To sort out what is unique about English-speaking Canada from what is generic to nations that stem from the Anglo-Celtic diaspora, knowledge of these other cases is crucial: perspective cannot be gained solely by our gazing into a mirror.(36)

Third, if we are to use the Anglo-Celtic diaspora as an entry point into a fresh way of viewing English-Canadian history, then it must be a textured view, one that recognizes that the Anglo-Celts were not a single entity in their own homelands (see table 2).(37) After 1961, the federal government began to lump all persons of British Isles origin into a single group in census figures. However much one may dislike this as a practice (historians want more precision, not less), the change was an important symptomatic event: a recognition that, by the last third of the twentieth century, the peoples from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, from the American colonies, and later from the United States, had indeed become functionally a single cultural group (even though most of them maintained some awareness of the particular segment of the Anglo-Celtic world from which their ancestors stemmed, and thus held multiple cultural identities). This cultural melding is the central fact of the history of English-speaking Canada, but that does not mean it was unique.

TABLE 2

Persons of British Isles Origin in Canada, 1861-1961 England, Other British Isles

Year and Wales Ireland Scotland and Unspecifeid
Total per cent
1871 33.5- 40.1 26.1- 0.3-- 100.0
1881 34.6- 37.6 27.5- 0.3-- 100.0
1901 41.2- 32.3 32.3- 0.4-- 100.0
1911 46.8- 26.9 25.7- 0.6-- 100.0
1921 52.2- 22.8 24.1- 0.9-- 100.0
1931 50.9- 22.9 25.0- 1.2-- 100.0
1941 53.9- 22.2 24.6- 1.3-- 100.0
1951 54.3- 21.5 23.1- 1.3-- 100.0
1961 52.5- 21.9 23.8- 1.8-- 100.0

As the Australian John Hirst has noted concerning his own country: Australian historians, looking for what is distinctive in Australian society, tend to transform the ambiguity of new into a law of social science: new societies Will be novel.'(38) In fact, the fundamental cultural evolution of English-speaking Canada -- the evolution from disparate Anglo-Celtic cultures to a coherent culture that is often called by the name of `British' or `English' -- was a worldwide phenomenon and not at all novel. In certain colonies -- Upper Canada, the Canadian Maritime provinces, New Zealand, Australia, English-speaking South Africa, and just possibly colonial America -- `British' culture did come into being in the sense that in these locales the Anglo-Celtic cultures of the British Isles lost most of their distinctive identifiers and merged. The process was distinct in each of these instances, but the fundamental course of evolution was similar. Yet the process was quite different from the frequently depicted discussions of the emergence of each nation's sense of national identity. The conventional picture is that a `British' culture inherited from the homeland (indirectly, in the Loyalist case) was modified by the new physical environment and catalysed by participation in imperial wars, and thereby emerged the New Zealand, Australian, or English-speaking Canadian identity. The study of the process of cultural transfer in general, and of ethnicity in particular, indicates that the process was more complex than that. There was no `British' culture to draw on, but, instead, there were several vigorous, distinct, and in many of their details incompatible Anglo-Celtic cultures found in the homeland. Therefore, an integral and absolutely necessary aspect of the development of a sense of identity was the creation of a `British' culture in the new homeland, one that did not in fact exist in the old. The melding of the several Anglo-Celtic cultures to establish a new and synthetic `British' culture was coterminous with the creation of the new national identities. Thus, when one sees Scots, English, Welsh, and Irish accepting in many contexts the term `British' in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, one is actually seeing the completion of the first step of their escape from the cultural hegemony of the Old World metropoles. It was then only a short step from being `British' to being a Canadian, an Australian, or a New Zealander. The big step was the first -- to cease to be primarily identified with a sectional identity in the Old World.

When the priority of the Old World sectional identities disappeared for most people is a matter of debate, nation by nation. And not all groups within each country lost their Old World signifiers as readily and as quickly as did others. (The Catholics of Irish origin stayed distinct longest, in most locales.) But, by the time of the First World War, it is dear that something has developed in several New Worlds that did not exist in the Old World -- and still does not exist -- a commonality of culture and identity.(39)

The first stage of the study of any diaspora group is primarily a statistical matter, dry but necessary: the assembly of data on the migration and subsequent patterns of residence, occupational mobility, and intergenerational change. For most of the groups that are now being built into the international literature on diasporas -- for example, East Indians, Chinese, Palestinians -- this task is in its infancy, and matters of the most elementary statistical observation are apt to take up much of the energy of the present generation of historians (and, indeed, must do so, if diaspora histories are not to be mere collections of anecdotes).

Fortunately, this stage has been largely (albeit not entirely) completed for English-speaking Canada. To our great good fortune, from 187i onward, the Dominion of Canada collected data: on the foreign-born, on ethnicity, and on the relationship of these matters to residence, occupation, and religion. These data are unequalled for any country in the English-speaking world. Further, in expert hands, these data, and predominion information, have yielded studies of nineteenth-century diaspora patterns that are unmatched in depth of data and sophistication of interpretation. In particular, the work of A. Gordon Darroch and Michael Ornstein should be built into any international literature on diasporas. Their work defines the basic social patterns of the Anglo-celtic diaspora as it affected English-speaking Canada and, taken as a whole, is one of the most important building blocks in any evidentiary-based history of English-speaking Canada.(40)

By virtue of the strong evidentiary base already in place, English-speaking Canada is one of the few places where historians can pursue the more subtle matters of the cultural aspects of the Anglo-celtic diaspora. Potentially, therefore, Canada is a lead study in the emerging scholarship of diaspora studies, for it possesses not only the quantitative data that must underlie any serious discussion of international diasporas but also indicates the range and character of the cultural issues involved. In return, diaspora studies can remind historians of English-speaking Canada that our history is a subset of a much larger phenomenon.

Historians of diasporas frequently focus on language. For minority groups, language is, first of all, an instrument of migration. As Jacob M. Landau notes: `in voluntary migration, language proficiency is a primary consideration influencing emigrants' selection of the target country in which they establish a diaspora or join one extant.'(41) Second, language acts as a cultural marker, an indicator at some level of fundamental cultural loyalties. And, in the context of diasporas, possession of a given language permits worldwide communication with fellow emigres, worldwide, and preserves contact with the homeland.

Where the linguistic dimensions of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora differed sharply from almost all subsequent diasporas was that their emigre's possessed before they left their homeland the language of the dominant culture to which they were going, and as their first language in most cases. The ethnic language and the language of the local hegemony were the same. This fact is taken as somehow natural, and is hardly remarked on by Canadian historians, but it is a central artifact of the history of English-speaking Canada. And it is forgotten at the same peril that a hydrologist would forget the fundamental feature of his or her profession, that water runs downhill. By virtue of the domination that the English language achieved as the prime language of communication in Western culture -- a development so unusual as to be genuinely unique -- Anglo-Celts, from their earliest days as a cultural group, were plugged into a communication network that included, successively, the two most quickly modernizing societies in the world (those of Great Britain and parts of the north of ireland, and, later, the United States), and into the communications grid of the two great world-straddling empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British and the American. By virtue of the world-circling English-language cultural grid, a small town postmaster in Canada West had communications facilities at fingertip which were scarcely equalled by those of the foreign minister of most small European powers. And a person of literary, philosophical, or religious bent could easily be in touch with the front edge of culture in the home countries, and in the United States and Australasia. (The degree to which Canadians were up to date on London novels, American sermons. or Australian travel literature is a constant wonder to anyone who studies nineteenth-century English-Canadian culture.) Language largely determines what one is able to think about, and it determines entirely to whom one is able to speak.

It is understandable, therefore, that a slippage of meaning occurred in Canadian historiography -- the confusion of English-language culture with English national origin. The English language was dominant in Scotland by 1700, in Wales by 1750, and in Ireland by 1800. This occurred at great cost to local cultures, but anglicization was an undeniable reality. The increasing hegemony of the English language had immense momentum, and when transplanted to other worlds -- the United States, the Canadas, Australia, and New Zealand -- it continued to roll, a great cultural avalanche. Thus, one had a continuity of cultural imperialism. With the exception of a few tiny pockets of Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia and in eastern Upper Canada, the Anglo-Celtic migrants had themselves undergone a thoroughgoing cultural imperialism -- linguistic anglicization -- before they migrated. Crucially, they continued the process themselves in the New World, so that indigenous groups and subsequent ethnic groups either had to come under the English-language cultural umbrella or be severely penalized. This suggests two important points about diasporas: they are as much cultural constructs as they are matters of physical migration, and the relationship of one diaspora to another is efficiently summarized by noting which set of competing linguistic patterns becomes dominant.

After language, the most important cultural artifact of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora as it affected English-speaking Canada was religion. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the greatest expansion of Christianity in its history as an organized religion. Entire continents -- North and South America, Australasia, plus much of Polynesia -- came under its religious suzerainty. Because governments in the Canadas flirted only briefly with the idea of an Established Church, the Canadas were an area of intense religious competition among various Christian churches, all of which were voluntary bodies. (The same held true for the other reception areas in the Anglo-Celtic diaspora -- Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.) The Christianity which the Anglo-Celtic diaspora brought in its baggage was of a very specific sort: the variety which had evolved in western Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and which was sharply distinct from the eastern forms of Christianity, such as the Coptic church and the various `Orthodox' faiths that had their roots in the eastern portion of the Roman empire. The two main branches of that western European faith -- Roman Catholicism and Protestantism -- more than any other set of factors, determined what the ethical base of the new society emerging in Canada would be (that is, what it was right and wrong to do). And, to a large degree, religion determined the meaning of any given event. Here it is necessary to emphasize that for religion to have been a persuasive influence upon society, not everyone had to have been religious, or to have been religious in the same way. Beliefs about religion are inherently individualistic (what someone believes in his heart is impossible to know, much less to standardize). And beliefs about religion shade into superstitions and into faith in magic, astrology, alchemy, and all sorts of ideas that are not part of official religious dogmas. Nevertheless, the Christian tradition laid down certain bedrock beliefs that were accepted generally throughout Canadian society: that there was an omniscient and omnipresent God; that humankind was inherently sinful; that humanity was redeemed from its inherent flaws by the death of Jesus Christ, provided that certain beliefs and practices were followed (the exact nature of these varied by denomination); that there was both a heaven and a hell, and that Christians merited eternal life and others did not.

The older of the two western European religious systems -- Roman Catholicism -- was, in theory, one church in Canada. But in day-to-day operations there were two major churches: the one French Canadian in ethnicity and French in its pastoral languages, the other Irish in ethnicity and English-speaking. (And there were two minority ones, produced by the Irish-Scots clerical split in Nova Scotia and the Acadian-Irish clerical split in New Brunswick.) Even in Quebec, Catholic congregations were either French or Irish. Irish priests served Irish congregations, and they looked, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, to Archbishop Paul Cullen as their spiritual, if not their official, ecclesiastical head. The other main branch of western European Christianity, Protestantism, was divided into several denominations, the most important of which in Canada were the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist. What they held in common was a sense of their own history. Each traced its origins to the Reformation and to the split with Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (although the historical consciousness of groups such as the Methodists began considerably later).

The 1871 census, the first of the Dominion of Canada, makes dear the dominance of Protestantism in English-speaking Canada.

TABLE 3

Denominational Groups in Canada, 1871 Protestant Roman Catholic Other per cent
Ontario--- 81.6- 16.9- 1.5
Quebec--- 14.2- 85.6- 0.2
New Brunswick-- 66.2- 33.6- 0.2
Nova Scotia-- 73.3- 26.3- 0.4
Total (confederated Canada) 56.4- 42.8- 0.8

The vitality of the Christian religion as it blossomed in English-speaking Canada, and its assumption of variegated, sometimes exotic, forms, have been underestimated until recently by most Canadian historians.(42) The forms that the religion took were not original (the bedrock beliefs of Christianity are ancient, traceable in part to Semitic roots at least four millennia old), nor were they solely Anglo-Celtic (pockets of European ethnic-language churches existed, and still exist). However, the overarching phenomenon was the immersion of the population outside Quebec in systems of religious values which were expressed in the English language and which stemmed from one of two sources: Irish Catholicism or British Protestantism.

Two interesting contrasts within the Anglo-Celtic diaspora require investigation. First, why, in the matter of religion, did the Australian colonies and New Zealand, societies very close to Canada in ethnicity and religious origins, quickly become less religious than Canada, both in terms of everyday beliefs and institutional adhesions? And, second, why were those societies much more successful in limiting sectarian conflict during the nineteenth century than were the various Canadian governments? As recently as 1798, a virtual civil war between Protestants and Catholics had been waged in the south of Ireland; Protestant-Catholic violence frequently flared in nineteenth-century Glasgow; anti-Catholic prejudice was rife in nineteenth-century England (witness the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851). So sectarian violence would be expected in the various New Worlds to which these people emigrated. Yet, in New Zealand, the chief piece of sectarian rioting -- the so-called Hokitika riot of 1868, was one isolated incident.(43) Similarly, after the worst case of sectarian violence in the Australian colonies, the Melbourne riots on the Orange holiday (12 July 1846) when shots were exchanged by Protestants and Catholics, the government of the colony clamped down and banned provocative demonstrations relating to religious differences among the crown's subjects.(44) In English-speaking Canada, Protestant and Catholic violence was widespread. One finds religious riots in Kingston and Perth in Ontario in the 1820s, and later in New Brunswick. In nineteenth-century Toronto, the annual Orange Parade in July was the scene of frequent riots -- and not just between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics -- but between Catholics and English-, Scots-, and Canadian-born Protestants.

Strikingly, despite these contrasts between Canadian religious patterns and those in other comparable Anglo-Celtic nations, on certain matters of `official culture' both continuity from the home country and virtually paradigmatic similarity to some other parts of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora are found. This is seen most clearly in the matter of state school systems which, arguably, are the most important form of social control in modernizing societies.

Obviously, the school as an institution was not invented in Canada; that is hardly a piquant observation. But what is salient is that in the largest jurisdiction in English-speaking Canada (Ontario) and in the provinces that modelled their school systems on that of Ontario, we can trace the origin of the official culture as inculcated in the schools directly back to the Old Country. This obtains because the most advanced system of popular education in the British Isles was in Ireland. In Ireland there had developed a system of mass education, founded in 1831, built around a remarkable set of school books, the Irish National Readers, which have been described as the best series of elementary school texts in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world. When the educational reformer Egerton Ryerson took control of the Ontario school system in the 1840s, he introduced these texts into Ontario's schools. By the time of Confederation, virtually all young people of English, Scottish, and Irish ethnicity in that province acquired their ideas of political loyalty and were taught moral values through a curriculum that had been designed specifically for Ireland. The Irish National Readers were also widely used by individual schools in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. These books from Ireland did not include Irish history, language, or folklore; instead, they attempted to reflect and reinforce `British' cultural and political values.

In addition to its curriculum, Ontario's educational structure was also taken from Ireland. Ryerson adopted the Irish system of a strong central authority that controlled what was taught in schools, operated a `normal school' to train teachers, and attempted to control teacher qualifications. At the same time, Ontario followed the Irish pattern of giving local school boards day-to-day control of the schools and of teacher employment policy. As in Ireland, the Ontario structure of education combined a strong central authority with a good deal of local control and a virtual absence of middle management. This system was transmitted to British Columbia by John Jessop, who had studied in Ryerson's normal school in Toronto during the 1850s, when that school was run by masters who themselves came directly from the central Irish normal school in Dublin. Largely through Jessop's work, British Columbia's Public School Act of 1873 was based on Ryerson's Ontario legislation of 1846-71. The Ryerson system was also followed in the Northwest Territories and in Manitoba, giving the Irish model considerable indirect influence. Of course the overseas model was adapted to the needs of each individual province, but the genealogy of this part of Victorian Canada's official cultare should not be forgotten.(45)

An additional break from the conventional mind-set is required. I would suggest that much of what seems to be internal to the history of education in English-speaking Canada actually is not, and that this history in many ways has been simply a subset of a much larger international paradigm. Here the focus is on one of the most contentious matters in international educational history: whether schools should be `integrated' or `segregated' along cultural lines. A lot of words that hide the importance of this issue -- terms such as `denominational education,' `freedom of choice,' `home language schooling' -- are employed, but the fundamental issue in every modernizing society has been whether the state should underwrite only a single school system or various separate systems. At heart, the issue is one of how the official culture is to be defined and inculcated. Within the Anglo-Celtic diaspora, the issue operationally came down to a single question: Should the state pay for Catholic schools?

The general answer -- articulated in Ireland in 1831, in Upper Canada by Egerton Ryerson in 1846, in New Zealand in 1877, in the several Australian colonies as they emerged during the nineteenth century, and in the United States by successive states and territories as they came into being and accepted the separation of church and state -- was no: no support of sectarian schools and, at most, a few pennies for ancillary services.(46)

This policy ran into an extraordinary nineteenth-century phenomenon, the Irish Catholic Church (and here one means the Irish Catholic Church, not the Roman Catholic Church). One must constantly remember that what the English thought of as their colonial empire was, from roughly 1850 onwards, simultaneously the spiritual empire of the Irish Catholic Church, only bigger, because it included the United States. The head of the Irish church was Paul Cardinal Cullen, the single most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century, save perhaps for the several popes. Cullen was, until 1846, head of the Irish College in Rome, then, successively, archbishop of Armagh (1849-52) and archbishop of Dublin (1852-78). These years coincided with the Great Famine and the post-famine flood of Irish migrants to points all over the world. Equally important, they coincided with the great strengthening of the Irish Catholic Church, and with the export of priests and, later, of seminaries to train priests. Cullen was a man of immense and ice-cold authority, great organizational ability, and implacable anti-protestant and anti-state beliefs. By roughly the 1870s the Catholic Church throughout the English-speaking world was a predominantly Cullenite church, its key personnel trained in Ireland, its new generation of leaders in the diaspora lands being trained in seminaries created on tight Cullenite lines. The result was that even long after Cardinal Cullen's death in 1878, successive generations of Catholic bishops were moulded in his particularly strict brand of ultramontanism.

Throughout the English-speaking world, Cullen's Irish Catholic Church collided with governments on the issue of mass education. The history of Irish Catholic education in the Anglo-Celtic diaspora effectively begins in August 1850 in the dreary Irish provincial town of Thurles. There Archbishop Cullen convened a full synod of the Irish bishops to deal with several matters, the most pressing of which was `mixed education.' This was the term for education wherein Catholic and Protestant children were schooled together and where control of the schools was not entirely in the hands of the local parish priest or, in the case of the secondary schools and university colleges, of a religious order or the ordinary of the diocese or the bench of bishops. `Mixed' as an adjective meant impure, as in `mixed marriage,' and, not surprisingly, the bishops condemned mixed education and set out guidelines to reduce the occurrence of this danger to the faith. The decrees of the Synod of Thurles were the formal declaration of war against the Irish government and against the forces of liberalism and Protestantism, and a truce would be declared only when the church had obtained full control over a school system that was financed by state funds, but not controlled by the state. The fundamental position of the Irish bishops (which was, in essence, the position of Paul Cullen, endorsed by his colleagues) was assimilated into the Syllabus of Errors promulgated by the pope in 1864- This condemned mixed education and state control of schooling, and was the papacy's writing large a viewpoint that was being most radically advanced in Ireland.

In later years, both in the Irish homeland and in the diaspora lands, a smooth gloss of apologetics was added to the Irish Catholic position on the proper arrangements for schooling, but in the third quarter of the nineteenth century the Irish bishops pushed for what they wanted with a rough and hard clarity. Shorn of rhetoric, Cullen and his fellow bishops demanded that (1) it be recognized that all education was religious education and thus there could be no separation of the secular from the religious curriculum; (2) all Catholic children were to be taught in Catholic schools; (3) in such schools, the teachers were to be Roman Catholics; (4) supervision of the teachers was to be under the control of the local parish priest, in the case of primary schools, and of either the bishop of the diocese or an official of a regular order, or order of nuns, in the case of secondary schools; (5) integration of Catholics and Protestants in schools was condemned, except in the case of Protestant children enrolling in a Roman Catholic school that was under secure Catholic control; and (6) the state was to recognize that it had no fundamental rights in education. in the middle nineteenth century, the form this dictum took was to suggest that it was permissible for the state to collect tax money for schools, but that these should be handed over to the church for its exclusive and unfettered use. Later, this was replaced by another dictum that, ultimately, meant the same thing: the right to control a child's schooling belonged to his or her parents, not to the state. What was understood in Catholic circles, but not voiced in wider public discussion, was that it was the duty of parents to respect and accept the counsel of their pastors on education, and, since the pastoral doctrine, enforced by the bishops, was that Catholic children should attend Catholic schools, this actually meant that the state should levy taxes for education and give them over to the church for its expenditure on schooling.

These were operational propositions and they were part of the kit bag of the Irish, and Irish-descended, bishops and clergy who took over the church throughout the Anglo-Celtic diaspora.

Crucially, the church won in every major case except the United States, where the us Constitution forbade aid to religion. With a tenacity far exceeding that of any long-distance runner, the successive generations of Catholic clergy kept to Cullen's program -- in many cases for more than a century. In New Zealand the state incrementally gave money to Catholic schools. It finally surrendered in 1975, when it began fully funding them. The same process occurred in Ontario, where, in the 1850s and early 1860s, Ryerson admitted partial aid to new separate primary schools, and wherein, step by step, money and level of education were increased until, in 1984, the province gave in completely and fully funded all Catholic primary and secondary schools. During the years 1960-5, direct state aid to private schools became the policy of both the federal government of Australia and of the states of Queensland, West Australia, and South Australia. Victoria lagged, but even there in the 1970s, funding of Catholic primary and secondary schools by the state was 42 per cent. Today, the proportion is effectively 100 per cent in Queensland, and that is the norm towards which the other states are moving. Essentially, in the old British Commonwealth, Cardinal Cullen won.(47)

This matter of cultural tension within the Anglo-Celtic diaspora has been given our attention because it illustrates, in a practical case-study, first, that Canadian events on a pivotal cultural issue sometimes cannot be understood at all unless one sees them in a much wider international context; second, that within the most important diaspora to affect English-speaking Canada, there were internal fractures that endured, even when the Anglo-Celtic migrants and their descendants adopted a strong unified Canadian identity; and third (and this has here to be asserted, rather than demonstrated, for want of space), that there were important alliances between Anglo-Celts and later migrant groups. In each of the national cases cited, the final victory of the Catholic Church over the state occurred only after the Catholics among the Anglo-Celtic population were joined by post-second World War Italians, Poles, and East Europeans of Roman Catholic faith.

The other matter in which English-speaking Canada (and, for that matter, Canada as a whole) was virtually paradigmatic, within the Anglo-Celtic diaspora, was in the development of its political culture. The institutional and procedural markers of this process are easily visible, even though the process itself was one that occurred at ground level and is often hard to document. These highly visible markers document the development from United Kingdom precedents of a limited-franchise parliamentary form of representative government, through its enlargement by way of universal manhood suffrage and, eventually, universal adult male and female suffrage in a parliamentary democracy, to evolution into a quasi-presidential democracy, based on strong party discipline and the virtual extinction of independent MPS. This process, from identical roots, is virtually identical to that which occurred in New Zealand and Australia. Strikingly, the development of this particular form of political culture preceded in many of its features the development of a similar form of political culture in the home islands. As in the matter of the creation of a `British' identity, the evolution of parliamentary-based democracy occurred more quickly in the lands of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora than in the home archipelago. This points to another area in which historians of the British Isles should study diaspora history for, at times, developments overseas are predictors of events in the homeland.

Ironically, there is one obverse case, in which homeland events were predictive of events in the political evolution of English-speaking Canada. This was the matter of attitudes towards troublesome ethnic minorities, and how one deals with them. If, in the early 1860s, one had asked the average English-Canadian small-time politician (anyone from the local JP to a member of the various legislative assemblies) what he knew about constitution-making, his data bank would have been limited to three major cases. The first of these was that of the United States, an instance that, during the 1860s, was hardly an example: the United States was in danger of falling apart and was therefore not a model. The second and third came from the Old Country, and these were apparently successful and directly applicable. One of these had occurred in 1707 when, in an attempt to suffocate contumacious elements in Scotland, the English government abolished that nation as a separate national jurisdiction and merged it within the new entity, Great Britain. This ploy succeeded, so, following a very bloody rebellion in ireland in 1798, the government of Great Britain subsumed that of ireland in 1801 - thus forming the new entity, the United Kingdom. This too seemed to work.

Therefore, as a means of controlling and limiting French Canada, a similar confederation was very attractive. A great deal is always made about the rights and privileges which Quebec maintained under Confederation. The fundamental fact, though, is that it was submerged in a larger society in which it inevitably and permanently would be a minority. Thus did the New World learn from the old.

In Westminster Abbey there is a tablet that bears the phrase Nisi Dominus Frustra, a summary of Psalm 127:1: `Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.' According to H.H. Anniah Gowda, at the unveiling of that tablet, which is dedicated to the honour of the various Commonwealth civil services, a former member of the Sudan civil service was asked by his wife what the Latin meant. The gentleman scratched his way back to preparatory school days and translated. `I suppose it means, unless you are boss it is no damn good.'(48) Or, to put it another way: if you cannot control things, they are not worth doing.

That is the very human, totally understandable, sort of feeling that leads to parochialism in the academic profession. So easy, so much more comfortable, to be in charge of our own tiny firm. At its best, the study of diasporas, and especially the Anglo-Celtic diaspora, reminds us that we, as English-speaking Canadians, are not really the boss, but only one of the many cultures at work on the shop floor of modern international society. This role implies a moral and professional humility that the historiography of English-speaking Canada could well use.

Neither in Canada nor in any other nation should the study of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora be considered a proprietary history. It belongs to anyone with enough initiative to become knowledgable. Indeed, students of other diasporas in the English-speaking lands are not only welcome to study it without fear of being charged with the solipsistic cultural crime of `appropriation,' but in fact they must do so: the history of cultural minorities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States of America makes sense only if one understands in some detail the complex character of the Anglo-Celtic groups which, in each case, formed the demographic majority for long periods of time, and which set down cultural tramlines that perdure to the present day. (1) Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (origin- ally published 1872, Middlesex: Puffin 1962), 274-5 (2) Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies of the Queen's University of Belfast; Toronto: P.D. Meany 1993) (3) Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotherg, eds., The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1976), 2 (4) Ibid. (5) George Shepperson, `The African Abroad, or the African Diaspora,' in T.O. Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes of African History: Proceedings (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House 1968), 153 (6) Graham W. Irwin, ed., Africans Abroad: A Documentary History of the Black Diaspora in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean during the Age of Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press 1977) (7) Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley, and Andrea Benton Rushing, eds, Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Howard University Press 1987) (8) Aubrey W. Bonnett and G. Llewellyn Watson, introduction to Emerging Perspectives on the. Btack Diaspora (Lanham: University Press of America 1989), 3 (9) Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, quoted ibid., xiii (10) Lorne Shirinian, The Republic of Armenia and the Rethinking of the North American Diaspora in Literature (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press (11) N. Gerald Barrier and Verne A. Dusenberry, eds., The Sikh Diaspora: Migration and the Experience beyond Punjab (Delhi: Chanakya Publications 1989) (12) On the Chinese diaspora, see Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, Chinese Diaspora in the, Western Indian Ocean (Port Louis: Editions de l'ocean Indien, Chinese Catholic Mission 1985); Harry J. Haines, Chinese of the Diaspora (London: World Council of Churches, Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, pamphlet no. 14). A model local study is Leonard Blussh, `Batavia, 1619-1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,' Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12 (March 1981): 159-78, (13) See Hyung-Chan Kim, ed., The Korean Diaspora: Historical and Sociological Studies of Korean Immigration and Assimilation in North America (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press 977). (14) Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanasev (1893-1966) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989) (15) George Kanarkis, Hellenic Letters of the Greek Diaspora since the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Sydney: Mitchell College 1985) (16) Gill Burke, `The Cornish Diaspora of the Nineteenth Century,' in Shula Marks and Peter Richardson, eds., International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives (Hounslow, Middlesex: Published for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies by M. Temple Smith 1984), 57-75 (17) William Safran, `Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myth of Homeland and Return,' Diaspora I (spring 1991): 83-4. Cited in Shirinian, The Republic of Armenia, 3 (18) Gabriel Sheffer, `A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics,' in Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas in International Politics (London: Croom Helm 1986), 9-10. This volume includes important discussions of Indian, Chinese, and African diasporas. (19) Michael G. Karni, ed., Finnish Diaspora, I: Canada, South America, Afiica, Australia and Sweden, and II: United States (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of ontario 1981) (20) Milton Israel, ed., The South Asian Diaspora in Canada: Six Essays (roronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, in cooperation with the Centre for South Asian Studies 1987) (21) Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard, eds., The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario 1982). See also Robert G. LeBlanc, `The Acadian Migrations,' Canadian Geographical Journal 81, 1 (1970), 10-19; Naomi E.S. Griffiths, The Contexts of Canadian History, 1686-1784 `Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1992). (22) John M. Forsey, ed., International Congress on the Hellenic Diaspora from Antiquity to Modern Times (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben 1991) (23) See, especially, Walker's `The Establishment of a Free Black Community in Nova Scotia, 1783-1840,' in Kilson and Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora, 205-36; and `on the Record: The Testimony of Canada's Black Pioneers, 1783-1865,' in Bonnet and Watson, eds., Emerging Perspectives on the. Black Diaspora, 79-113. (24) See Norman Buchignani and Doreen Marie Indra, `Key Issues in Canadian-Sikh Diaspora,' in Barrier and Dusenberry, eds., The Sikh Diaspora, 141-84; and James G. Chadney, `The Formation of Ethnic Communities: Lessons from the Vancouver Sikhs,' ibid., 185-99. (25) Henry Radecki, A Member of a Distinguished Family: The Polish Group in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1976) (26) The contrast between Canadian Ethnic Studies and its American cognate, the Journal of Ethnic Studies, is instructive. The American Journal, founded in 1973, became increasingly ascholarly and anti-historical, and finally ceased publication in the winter of 1992. (27) The McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History includes Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (1988); John E. Zucchi, Italians in Toronto: Development of a National Identity, 1875-1935 (1988); Vaira Vikis-Freibergs, Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs: Essays in Honour of the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Kr. Barons (1989); Orm Overland, Johan Schroder's Travels in Canada, 1863 (1989); james Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict: The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars (1989); Christopher MCAU, Class, Ethnicity, and Social Inequality (1990); W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever. Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (2nd ed. 1990); Marianne McLean, The People of Glen. garry: Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820 (1991); Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (1991); Ken Coates, Best Left as Indians: Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840-1973 (1991); Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (1992); Allen P. Stouffer, The Light of Nature and the Law of God: Antislavery in Ontario, 1833-1877 1922); Kerry Abel, Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene, History (1993); susan Gabori, In Search of Paradise: The Odyssey of an Italian Family (1993); Louis Rosenberg, Canada's Jews (2nd ed. 1993); Catharine Anne Wilson, A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada (1994); Pauline Greenhill, Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English-Canadian Culture in Ontario (1994); Carmela Patrias, Patriots and Proletarians: Politicizing Hungarian Immigrants in Interwar Canada 1994). (28) For the most recent iteration, see `An Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada,' 36-7 Eliz. 11, c 93. (29) See Leslie A. Pal, Interests of State: The Politics of Language, Multiculturalism and Feminism in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993), 189-215. (30) For a recent review of the research conducted under the banner of state-sponsored multiculturalism, adjudged from a social science viewpoint, see J.W. Berry and `A. Laponce, eds., Multiculturalism in Canada: A Review of Research (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993). (31) For an antidote to such thinking, see Greenhill, Ethnicity in the Mainstream. (32) These and other more fugitive references are found in Peter Lyon, `On Diasporas -- the Jewish, the British and Some Others: A Note,' found in The Diaspora of the British: Collected Seminar Papers, No. 31 (London: University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies 1982), 72-80. (33) Phillip Buckner, `Whatever Happened to the British Empire?' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, ns, vol. 4 (nd), 4 (34) If historians of the second British Empire largely have lost interest in the former colonies of settlement -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, being the most important -- there is some interest among historians based in continental Europe. The University of Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion publishes both monographs and a journal, International European Journal of Overseas History. The centre's work is literally globe-circling, but within the concept of `overseas history' is included the British Isles diaspora. (35) Derived from Historical Statistics of Canada (2nd ed.), Series A125-163 (36) For useful examples of the use of the comparative method to break out of the confines of Canadian historical self-involvement, see Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore, eds., Canadian and Australian Labour History: Towards a Comparative Perspective (St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History 1990); Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989); and Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1994). (37) Derived from Historical Statistics of Canada (2nd ed.), Series A125-63 (38) John Hirst, `Australian History and European Civilization,' Quadrant `May 1993): 36-7. The entire article deserves close attention by Canadian (39) I take issue here with Phillip Buckner's argument in his CHA presidential address (28-9) that the emigrants to Canada from the British Isles thought of themselves as a single group, `as Britons,' even before they arrived. (Buckner admits that secondary self-definition, such as Irish or Welsh, could be held simultaneously.) The problem is that he is equating anglicization, which characterized all the British isles groups, with their identifying themselves as members of a single cultural group. Manifestly, if they had such a single identity before they got on the boat to Canada, it follows that such a single cultural identity -- a common British Isles-wide sense of self-definition -- existed in the homeland. That, however, is disprovable, not merely for the nineteenth century but for the present day. Significant portions of the British Isles still are at civil war, because of a failure of such a shared self-definition to emerge. (40) See `Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871: The Vertical Mosaic in Historical Perspective,' Canadian Historical Review 61 (Sept. 1980): 305-33; `Ethnicity and Class Transitions over a Decade: Ontario, 1861-71, Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1984, III-37; `Class in Nineteenth-century Central Ontario: A Reassessment of the Crisis and Demise of Small Producers during Early Industrialization, 1861-1871,' Canadian Journal of Sociology 12 (1988), reprinted in Gregory S. Kealey, ed., Class, Gender, and Region: Essays in Canadian Historical Sociology (St John's: Committee on Canadian Labour History 198o), 49-72. (41) Jacob M. Landau, `Diaspora and Language,' in Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas, 77 (42) The most systematic effort is the McGill-Queen's Studies in Religious History, edited by George Rawlyk. The volumes published thus far include William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (1989); Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839-19l8 (1989); Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (1991); Robert Wright, A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939 (1991); Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (1992); Rosemary R. Gagan, A Sensitive Independence: Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925 (1992); Terrence Murphy and Gerald Storz, eds., Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930 (1993); Brian P. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism (1993); George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, eds., Amazing Grace: Studies in Evangelicalism in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Beyond (1994); W. John McIntyre, Children of Peace (1994); John Marshan, A Solitary Pillar: Montreal's Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution (1994). (43) See Richard P. Davies, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics, 1868-1922 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press 1974), 11-24. (44) John Hirst, `Australia's Absurd History,' Overland 117 (Feb. 1990), 6 (45) The Irish background on this matter is found in D.H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), and the New World carry-over in D.H. Akenson, `Mass Schooling in Ontario: The Irish and `English Canadian' Popular Culture,' in Being Had: Historians Evidence and the, Irish in North America (Toronto: P. D. Meany 1985), 143-87. For a summary of these matters see David Wilson, The Irish in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association 1989), 18-19. (46) A form of separate schools had been created in 184i in Ontario (mostly for Native Canadians), but these schools had the potential to become sectarian. Ryerson's intention was that they would not be encouraged and would `die out, not by force of legislative enactment, but under the influence of increasingly enlightened and enlarged (47) In addition to the items cited above, see Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860-1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press 1990), 159-90; L.J. Blake, ed., Vision and Realisation: A Centenary History of State Education in Victoria (Melbourne: Education Department of Victoria 973), 1: 1-415; Alan Barcan, A Short History of Education in New South Wales (Sydney: Martindale Press 1965). The history of the church in Australia is surveyed in Patrick O'Farrell's pioneering work, The Catholic Church and Community: An Australian History (2nd ed., Kensington: New South Wales University Press i985). (48) H. H. Anniah Gowda, `Welcome Speech,' in H. H. Anniah Gowda, ed., The Colonial and Neo-Colonial Encounters in Commonwealth Literature (Mysore: University of Mysore 1983), 1

The author wishes to thank, for their support of his research, the curators of the Harold White Fellowship of the National Library of Australia; the directors of the Villa Serbelloni Centre, Bellagio, Como, Italy; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
COPYRIGHT 1995 University of Toronto Press (Canada)
DESCRIPTORS: Population transfers--History; Emigration and immigration-- History; Canada--History; United Kingdom--Emigration and immigration SPECIAL FEATURES: illustration; table FILE SEGMENT: MI File 47

Review title: African perspectives on cultural diversity and multiculturalism.

TEXT:

Introduction

The Historical Trajectory

The quest for human origins by archaeologists and anthropologists has led to the designation of the Eastern African rift valley and the surrounding highlands plateaus as a crucial area for research. From the point of view of the Humanities, this then becomes the starting point for reflections and speculations about the beginnings of human cultures. Was humankind monocultural at the moment of its creation? Are we all descendants of the metochondrial Eve? The researchers alert us to the increasing diversifications and complexifications undertaken by the genus homo from its beginnings nearly four million years ago to its most recent status as homo sapiens sapiens. African mythologies enthusiastically take over where archaeology leaves off: in the beginning there was only one human species, and it sprang from Ife according to the Yoruba of Western Nigeria. Podho, the Luo eponymous ancestor of all mankind, was a Luo according to another eastern African variant of the myth. How then did mankind split into diverse cultures, complexions and tongues? Scientists offer varieties of answers to suit all opinions, and this essay will not revisit them. It is known that at the beginning of historical time in Africa, ancient Egypt was a multicultural society, deeply rooted in the Nile Valley, drawing its waters, its marvels and its wealth from Sudanic Africa while also cross-fertilizing with the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, the islands of Crete, and the cultures of southern Europe. Martin Bernal's work, Black Athena makes an important contribution in this regard. At the closing moments of its decline through conquest by Alexander of Macedon ancient Egypt was home to Black Africans, brown Libyans, Arabs, Phoenicians, Turks, and white Greeks, Romans and Macedonians. Its supreme achievement lay in this multicultural diversity.

Were the ancient Egyptians exclusively black? Much controversy surrounds this question. It was the African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop who first made this claim in 1954. The skin colour of ancient Egyptians seems not to have been an important issue for the successive generations of African-based scholars. But it has become a fighting weapon in the hands of African-American scholars, including Yosef Ben-Yochanan and Molefe K. Asante. In the latter's formulation ancient Egypt is a crucial origin of his political schema known as Afrocentricity, an idealist episteme (Lemelle, 1994) which advocates the viewing of all things African from an African-American perspective. The pedagogic aspects of this endeavour has led to the call for inclusion of this perspective in the curricula of schools in the United States of America, while its performance side has called for a recognition of multiculturalism in all aspects of human endeavour in the U.S.A. Recent debates have tended to conflate the politics of race and class, the politics of exclusion and empowerment, the questions of gender, race and class all under the shibboleth: multiculturalism.

What then, is multiculturalism? It is a specific contemporary historical conjuncture in the politics of knowledge, a call for a critical evaluation of received forms of knowledge, a surveillance on the traditional canons, a refutation of all the hegemonic Eurocentric claims to 'universalism' that have underwritten the continuous valorization of the rhetorics of Western European empires and the continued denigration of the values of the colonized, the dominated and the oppressed. Multiculturalism is a contest for space; intellectual space, homeopathic space, quotidian space. As a moment of inspiration, it is a reminder that calls for a parity of esteem between the multiples of cultures on planet earth. As a political strategy, it is a weapon for struggle aimed at the formulation of policies that advocate equality, equilibrium and fairness in the allocation of emphases and resources in the classrooms and in public places: in government, museums, theatres, roads, restaurants.

Who are its most ardent advocates? These are the new citizens of the post-emancipation, post-imperial, post-colonial and post civil-rights worlds. What the representatives of Postcoloniality have in common is that they were all excluded from History by the erstwhile makers of the same History. This exclusion calls for narration and explanation, for it is at the core of the contest.

The emergence and development of European-based empires and colonialisms from the fifteenth century onwards subjected the continents and islands of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia to European rule and domination. Empires separated peoples from peoples. There were the rulers of Empire and the subjects of empire. Gradually and with increasing force and violence, indigenous Africans, native Americans and Asians and native Australians were subjected to the domination of the west, more specifically to the domination of north-western Europe. Economic forces cast Europe at the centre of this emergent world: Europe was the hub of the emergent capitalist system. Knowledge became Eurocentric. World History became European History. Ideologies were needed to justify this act of global domination. By the nineteenth century racism - the act of discriminating against peoples and civilizations on the basis of skin colour - had become a centrepiece ideology of the Europeans. Colonized peoples, Africans, Arabs, Asians, native Australians and Americans, all were labeled as inferior peoples. Their very civilizations were despised, then denied. Their very achievements were attributed to foreigners, a vivid example being the claim that the Zimbabwe civilization of Central Africa was built by the Phoenicians or even by South Indians. The colonized peoples all became peoples without a history, in the words of Eric Wolf. There was Europe, and there were peoples without history. Europe in contrast, became the centre of History, or movement, of purposive events, again in the words of the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Europe appropriated for itself the achievements of all the former civilizations. Chinese gunpowder, the Arabic renaissance cultures of the 9th-10th centuries, ancient Egyptian civilizations all became attributed to European genius. Coinciding with the heyday of imperialism and colonization in the late 19th century, it became possible for the poet Rudyard Kipling to celebrate the conquest of the "men of the lesser breeds without the law" through the maxim gun, which the British in Africa had, while the Zulu and the Asante did not. Africa became a nothingness, in the words of Hegel; and blank darkness, Trevor-Roper agreed a century later, was not a subject of history.

These assumptions laid the basis for the colonial project of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British, French and later the Belgian, German and Italian empires in Africa. David Livingstone summed up this project as being the spreading of Christianity, Commerce and Civilization to fill in the darkness and barbarism that was assumed to obtain in Africa. Europe moved in to fill Africa. It was to be a one-way traffic, with European philosophies, ontologies, epistemes, religions and metaphysics replacing the indigenous frameworks and systems of thought. European Christianity bore the light into the soul of pagan Africa. Europe was Civilization: Africa represented Barbarism. Africa was set up as "a paradigm of difference" (Mudimbe, 1994: xii). It is these Manichean constructs that lent urgency to the colonial enterprise, and to its determined non-compromising stand against African cultures, expressions and performances. The civilizing mission of Europe was a total assault on Africa.

At the level of gnosis therefore African knowledge was denied, to be replaced by European missionary gnosis and archives according to Vumbi Yoka Mudimbe, the Zairois scholar. All learning came from Europe, as did all experience, all History. "Our ancestors, the Gauls," young Leopold Sedar Senghor was told to recite at school in Senegal, in spite of the fact, known to all his Serer people, that their true ancestors had their histories and kingdoms in Cayor and in Waalo, civilizations as illustrious and as eventful as those in Gaul as described by Julius Caesar heretofore, if not more illustrious. Colonialism subjected the Africans to a western-type education that was simultaneously a denial of African knowledge, personhood and agency. It assumed that the African mind was blank, to be flooded with Europe. Europe thus became the centre. Other cultures like Hindu philosophy were reluctantly relegated to the periphery, while Africa was specifically denied its cultural entity and integrity. There was European civilization, but there was no Africanity.

It is this denial of their Africanity that first provoked the nascent African intelligentsia resident in Paris in the 1930's and 1940's - Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Jean Price Mars, Alioune Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, Leon Damas - to engage in a cultural critique that questioned the very premises. These students distilled their Africanity into its essentials, which they named Negritude. They proclaimed this recovery through their journal, Presence Africaine. The fascinating aspect of their expression is that they took their African Presence, their Africanity as self-evident. They reclaimed their Humanity alongside other races and cultures. They assumed the vitality of the African contribution to a possible "cross-fertilization of the universal" (Senghor), that is to a possible humane multi-cultural and diverse post World War II humanity. They recognized that Europe had alienated them through a process of cultural deletion and through imperial brutalization. They sought to re-humanize themselves by reveling in their Africanity. They sought to move the margins to the centre. Negritude provided a liberating anti-racist racism and anti-colonial discourse.

This discourse by the colonized, on their own terms, called for a revisitation of the fundamental episteme. Africa, not Europe, was to be the source of inspiration of their poetry, their own history. The African Renaissance as they called it led to concerted interest and study of African languages, African oratures, African Histories, African religions and philosophies, and to a critical appreciation of African art. The renaissance called for a restoration of African roots, for the reintroduction of the African man into the world in the worlds of the African historian B.A. Ogot.

"Political independence without cultural independence is meaningless," wrote President Senghor in the early years of African nationhood. The poet-President was in a position to know, for in spite of the self-evident accomplishments of the Francophone evolues at metropolitan French universities, they had been culturally conditioned to be unmistakably French and decidedly non-African in their intellection. As Frantz Fanon put it in Black Skins White Masks, the evolues were masters at quoting from European texts, from Racine to J.J. Rousseau. Their African intellectual trousseau, in contrast, was absent. Othello's countrymen, fully arraigned in the academic habitus of the West, were nevertheless still thought of as Calibans by the metropolitan centre. There was no African gnosis on the banks of the Seine river. Hence the urgency of the quest for cultural independence soon after the attainment of statehood. At the individual and group psychological level, Frantz Fanon's writings provided a programmatic agenda, that of Decolonizing the Mind, a later title of Kenya's novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo. That has been an important aspect of the global decolonization process, for as Syed Hussein Alatas of Malaysia early observed in The Myth of The Lazy Native, all colonized evolues had "captive minds," that is minds totally colonized. Indeed in Nkrumah's Ghana of the 1950's they aptly just called it a "colonial mentality." Once the process of decolonizing the mind took root, it brought in its train both for the new states and for the emergent nationalist intelligentsia the compelling need for the Africanization of learning at all levels of education, from primary schools to the newly created Universities within Africa.

While Negritude might have only spelled the elocution of a culture, the force of African nationalism operationalized the sentiment into a reliable programme of action. Here there is need to be expansive in the embrace of the term nationalism, for it was a contemporaneous emotion that encompassed state nationalism, regional federalism, Pan Africanism, Civil rightsisms, and colour solidarity all in one breadth. Pop singers in Harlem could in 1965 sing about "Oginga Odinga of Kenya," raise the rhetorical question of "what's goin' on in Selma?" urge Odinga to find out the true nature of events, and in case of failure exhort him to "go tell Mzee Kenyatta." There is a need to see the world of 1957-1963 through the lenses of not only Presidents Kwame Nkrumah and John Fitzgerald Kennedy with their contractive perspectives on global super-power and socialist agenda, but also through the Africanist performance lenses of South African Miriam Makeba, Caribbean Harry Belafonte and continental American Louis Armstrong; but also through the rhetorical invocations and positionings of Tom Mboya and Martin Luther King; and through the strategizing politics of Malcolm X and Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea. Then, in the 1950s-1960s, as now in the 1990s, there was a global African world signified by this multivocal advocacy for continental, race, and colour identification. The then young political scientist Ali Mazrui in his 1967 book Towards a Pax Africana labelled this sentiment as a study in ambition, and indeed thought that the notion of "We are all Africans" was worthy of the dignification as a concept. President Julius Nyerere thus far had earlier anticipated Professor Mazrui, arguing in 1962 that Africanity was ultimately derived from two predicates: the fact of black skin colour, and the consequential fact of a three and a half-century long history of colonial humiliation of all such 'darkies' on the basis of their skin colour. As he wrote in 1962 at the moment of Tanganyika's triumph in struggle: "The African looked at his white oppressors, looked at his fellow bonded African, and knew instinctively that we Africans are all brothers." As a later Ali Mazrui would affirm this in his TV series The Africans, the African race, designated as such by the West as a category for negation, has historically been the most humiliated slice of humanity in the past five hundred years. Thus wrote President Nyerere in his 1967 seminal document, The Arusha Declaration: "We have been humiliated a great deal."

The route out of this collective transcontinental and racial humiliation was thought through and determinated to be the recapture of political power and the assertion of political independence by colonized Africans. "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will be added unto you" invoked Kwame Nkrumah. "The tree of Uhuru (freedom) must be watered with human blood" intoned the inscrutable London-trained anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta in the 1940s and early 1950s in Kenya. This enigmatic message from one of the most traveled-(read-westernized)-pioneer African political elites stirred resonant political chords amongst his African audiences. It spelt forebodings of mystery and disaster for the colonial settlers resident in Africa and for the far-flung forces of empire from Algiers to Cape Town. The prophesy was nevertheless none too real. Kenyatta had anticipated Africa's liberation as a messy, bloody path. The History of this trajectory has two signifiers. It opens with Jomo Kenyatta's dignified march into detention on the dawn of his arrest on October 20, 1952. It realizes its fulfillment in the triumphal re-entry of Nelson Rohlahla Mandela into the embrace of human citizenship on February 20, 1990. In between lies the histories of African nationalism, national liberation, possible peoples' revolutions. Intertwixed in these seemingly autonomous narratives is the essay on National Cultures.

Gendered Discourses

A contemporaneous movement within the United States of America in the 1950s and 1960s was the Civil Rights Movement. The opening date to this era was 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court gave a ruling on the segregation system in schooling. Its high water mark was the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. As an enabling legislation this act empowered the African American population significantly. But its benefits were not limited to one race; indeed its lasting legacy was that it opened the doors to the women's movement both within the U.S.A. and globally. As a particular movement in the west, the woman's question found its most articulate expression in Feminism, itself an assemblage of various feminist theories: Liberal, Radical, Postmodern. Feminism has sought to bring women's issues from the margins to the centre of academic research, writing and pedagogy. It has sought, within Africa, to emphasize women's central roles in the household economy, in the political economy, and contrasted this socio-economic centrality with the evident political powerlessness of African women within the various state regimes and systems.

The political agenda has thus called variously for more inclusion, more empowerment, more enabling legislation aimed at improving the woman's place in the household, in the local economy and in national politics. Even more significantly, it has been realized that for these social transformations to succeed in Africa the issue must not be confined to the woman's place, but must embrace gender. But how is gender defined? Sandra Whitworth writes: "In part, gender means knowledge about sexual difference. This means that understandings about the appropriate relationships between women and men, the roles which they fill, even what it is to be 'feminine' or 'masculine,' vary across time, place and culture; that is, they are social constructs. Analyzing gender relations entails exploring the ways in which these understandings are constructed and maintained - locally, nationally and globally." (Whitworth, 1994: 4) In Africa, this cultural component of gender has a particularly urgent pertinence. For there is a gridlock between kinship and gender in Africa that for the majority of peasant women takes the form of a permanent fixture. In the words of Christine Obbo, "Kinship groups recruit members through marriage and birth, the price of membership in kinship groups is the acceptance of social definitions, duties and obligations. Social identity, the division of labour and property transfers are anchored in kin relationships which are maintained in part, through systems of gender stratification - that is, the gender system. Much ideology surrounding kinship and other relations between men and women defines them according to whether they are social males or social females and specifies the norms for each gender. The beliefs and values associated with each gender in turn force men to behave according to this gender differentiation. Biological differences are elaborated into social differences as well as power inequalities: men and women have unequal access to scarce and valued resources of society." (Obbo, 1994: 183) Gender is reified into Being in these terms, and so becoming a woman or becoming a man entails the routinization of the gender prescriptions. "Gender in other words, is lived as ontology, not as epistemology." (MacKinnon, 1994: 246) The various efforts at reform within the individual state systems in Africa have to one extent or another been geared toward the alleviation of these seemingly permanent inequalities and disadvantages. Reformers have called for legal reforms pertaining to marriage, divorce, property inheritance; for equal pay for equal work; for equitable opportunities in the schooling of girls and boys. Significantly, scholarship had also advocated transformations within specific institutions; marriage, entrance to police academies for example. African scholarship has not yet quite yet come of age enough to interrogate the mental/ideological construct known as gender in itself. Continental African cultures do not necessarily posit a binary power relationship between men/women, male/female that is so characteristic of the industrialized West. In many African societies status rather than coercive control is the norm, and women are structurally central in the sense that "the mother has some degree of control over the kin unit's economic resources and is critically involved in kin-related decision-making processes." (Tanner, 1983: 131) Anthropologists have observed the widespread egalitarian relationship between the sexes in both matrifocal societies (Amadiume, 1987) and among patrilineal, patriarchal societies (Oboler, 1994) across much of Black Africa, and within Black American households as well.

At the international level African women have cultivated new constituencies within the evolving and successive discourses on African Women and the Law, Women and Development, Women in Development, Women's Roles in Sustainable Development, and now Gender and Development. As a matter of intellection the UNDP through its UNIFEM program (Africa division) has generated formidable architectures of knowledge with regard to the issues of Gender and Social Development. The quantum leap that has next to be made involves conscientizing the male component of the African gender complex into the possibility of centering gender discourses within the practices of everyday life. For the mind indeed may be willing: the social structure has on the other hand to be overhauled. Paradoxically, this stance requires that the Africans (and all the others) who are involved in unpacking and re-negotiating the gender question must be granted their intellectual autonomy to produce their own appropriate types of knowledge, to respect their own historical specificity. For a lingering fear in the minds of many postcolonial societies remains that of cultural imperialism.

One of the observable happenstances of the Women's Decade Nairobi Conference in 1985 was the vocality with which African women, along with many other non-westerners, contested the seemingly hegemonic claims that western feminists made throughout the month-long meeting; and also against the public advocacy of lesbianism at the same exhibition. African women at one level argued that they perceived of these westernisms as being opposed to the idea of the family - in its gendered African context. At another but related theoretical level the case was made that both feminism and lesbianism were in any case culture-specific isms that had no claim to universality. Madhu Kishwar from India has recently articulated this non-western viewpoint by arguing: ". . . while I stand committed to pro-women politics, I resist the label feminism because of its overclose association with the western women's movement. I have no quarrel with western feminist movements in their own context. . . However, given our situation today, where the general flow of ideas and of labels is one way - from West to East, in the overall context of a highly imbalanced power relation - feminism, as appropriated and defined by the West, has too often become a tool of cultural imperialism. The definitions, the terminology, the assumptions, even the issues, the forms of struggle and institutions are exported from West to East and too often we are expected to be the echo of what are assumed to be the more advanced women's movements in the West." (Kishwar, 1994: 23) Lest the 'West' be deemed as homogeneous, note has also been taken of the space occupied by the Black feminist movements in both Western Europe and the Americas. Occupying this liminal space Black feminist writers specify the significance and uniqueness of the black woman's historical experience in the West, and the long tradition of resistance that this history gave birth to. Their specific political and epistemological loci have influenced the ways in which Black feminist intellectuals have produced "alternative ways of validating knowledge itself," argues Patricia Hill Collins. "Black women have a self-defined standpoint of their own oppression. Two interlocking components characterize this standpoint. First, Black women's political and economic status provides them with a distinctive set of experiences that offers a different view of material reality than that available to other groups. . . African-American women as a group experience a different world than those who are not Black and female. Second, these experiences stimulate a distinctive Black feminist consciousness concerning that material reality." (Collins, 1994: 83) This value judgement is however based on historicity. Black American women are African and American both culturally and socially. They thus entertain an epistemology with "a both/or" orientation, the act of being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it." (Collins, p. 86) Nor is this all. African-American women are also divided internally by the fact of class. All this and more: "Not only do women diverge in terms of how 'race,' ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability affect their experiences, other factors such as historical context and geographical location, also need to be part of the framework of feminist analyses." (Maynard, 1994: 9) Is there a way out of this quandary? Ntozake Shange has often urged her African-American audiences to move away from the feminism of white women against men. Instead, she has argued for Complimentarity, not opposites; for Womanism rather than feminism. And in saying this she would have a ready women's audience in Black Africa.

The emergence of gay and lesbian politics in the U.S.A. was another unintended byproduct of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1960s was the conjuncture. "The project of gay/lesbian liberation was conceived in the United States along the lines of ethnic or racial politics, largely because that seemed politically effective. The impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S. political imagination made them ripe for imitation. The white feminist movement as well as the gay and lesbian movement(s) appropriated not only the (often contradictory) arguments for civil rights and for group pride but also the descriptions and metaphors for position; . . . The large component of the cultural nationalism in radical gay/lesbian politics is the result of the 'racial' articulation." (Phelan, 1994: 60) This politics obtains because there is a lesbian culture, or more accurately there are lesbian cultures and subcultures. It is addressed both to the lesbian community and to the non-lesbians, for "There is no such thing as a lesbian without the category 'lesbian,' and there is no such category outside of a human community. Lesbians "compear" (in Jean-Luc Nancy's term, literally "appear together" only in and through community). Compearance does not mean mutual support for stable identity, but continually threatens it." (Phelan, 1994: 85) The threat is none too real because all the hitherto oppressed and marginalized lesbians and gays have become adept at political mobilization, challenging the hegemonic, cultural, legal and political systems, articulating identity interests, aimed at putting themselves at the centre. Equally specifically, they have produced new epistemes: radical feminist international relations, feminist science, lesbian legal theory. This theoretical and academic stake in intellectual and social citizenship generates ferment, opposition and provokes both phlegmatic and rationalistic defenses of the canon by the dominant incumbent elites.

Yet another such culturally-specific construct, also a consequence of the women's movement, is the argument "that masculinity in Western society is in deep crisis; . . . many men are haunted by feelings of emptiness, impotence and rage. They feel abused, unrecognized by modern society. While manhood offers compensations and prizes (read privileges), it can also bring with it autism, emptiness and despair . . . being male is not a comfortable or 'natural' position for some men." (Horrocks, 1994: 1-2) Horrocks designates this situation, the threnody of Western men lamenting their decentring in the recent past, as a paradox: "patriarchal masculinity cripples men. Manhood as we know it in our (read Western) society requires such self-destructive identity, a deep masochistic self-denial, a shrinkage of the self, a turning away from whole areas of life, that the man who obeys the demands of masculinity has become only half-human." (op. cit.: p. 25) The awareness that gender is socially constructed, that masculinity is a sociological rather than a psychological category does not alleviate the angst that Horrocks describes above. Contrast this western autistic, schizoid, narcissistic casting with what prevails in rural Africa. There the western masculinity/femininity power equation is not reproduced. Rather, men build alliances within kin and beyond kin through friendships (Cohen & Odhiambo, 1989: 124-127), through age-set systems, and through bodily bondings as in blood-brotherhoods (White, 1994). The masculine African is not yet into a post-industrial crisis. The nexus of men/women relationships in Africa runs on the axis of separate roles and responsibilities both valued for their mutuality and complementarity within the ideal household (Oboler, 1985).

Ageism is a specifically post-industrial category of the disenfranchised, one that has been in public focus in the West since the mid-1970s. In the literature, "Ageism is portrayed as similar to racism and sexism, in so far as stereotyping based purely on age is used to discriminate systematically against individuals." (Gatz & Cotton, 1994: 334) For the African the striking aspect of western ageism that is also bewildering is that it offers for young western people "a way to establish the aged as a separate and different group for whom it is unnecessary to feel personally responsible." (ibid) Demographically there are going to be many more middle class white people living longer as the "baby-boomers," born in the 1945-1964 period, attain old age in the next two decades, and so the fact of their children feeling personally not responsible for them will have a wider impact than presently. A semantic leap takes place when one comes to Africa, where Elders must be the more appropriate nomenclature, and where being an Elder commands respect, care and even adoration. (Cohen & Odhiambo, 1992: 55-58) The culturally-specific context in which the African sense of community embraces aging whereas the West finds it burdensome in turn provokes debates, beyond this paper, over the notion of cultural relativity, wherein one prevalent Western stereotype casts the aged as dependents, while Africans revere them as the scarce resources - fountains of wisdom.

Human Diversity and Multiculturalism

The starting point for discussions on human diversity must be on culture, "the embodiment of values, beliefs, attitudes and languages that have emerged as adaptations to the peculiar geographic and temporal circumstances that have impinged on the lives of a group of people who agree on what to call themselves;" and which values, beliefs, attitudes and languages have proved to be adaptive and important enough to be passed on to the next generation, according to Walter J. Lonner. But "culture" complicates 'things' in the words of the same author, for there are a myriad definitions of culture. Even the traditional handbook, G.P. Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas (1967) includes nearly nine hundred existing societies organized around six culture areas: Sub-Saharan Africa, Circum-Mediterranean, East Eurasia, Oceania, North America, and South America. What is more, culture is an abstract idea, a hypothetical construct that is at the same time dynamic in its very construction and application. But at the very least it is a register of human diversity.

Eurocentrism, the prospectus that sustains the linkage between the arts, letters and civilization with white-skinned male patriarchy inhabiting north-west Europe and colonial Americas has been at the centre of all multicultural debates as well as those on human diversity. The view that all the best that there is to know flows from ancient Greece into the present 'canon' of great books authored by dead white males is currently labelled an "Aryan myth," (Bernal, 1987), and contested as such. Interwoven in this fabric is the term race, a term that is thought by some as central to the notion of European superiority over other peoples, and by the dissenting others as having no validity as an analytical category. Common-sense understandings of race that itemize such variables as skin colour, continent of origin, religion, nationality and language, are by some seen as itemizations of 'natural' difference that do not demonstrate the real effects of race on society. Rather, the more meaningful focus should be on "how racial logics and racial frames of reference are deployed, and with what consequences." (Donald & Rattansi as quoted by Maynard, 1944: 10) How far these logics are deployed would serve as teleguides into the contractive and comparative practices of racism from the reported Turkish police harassment of Black African students in Istanbul (New Africa, February, 1995: 7) to the Rodney King police beatings in Los Angeles. These deployments illuminate the different experiences of racism by African peoples in various parts of the globe, from China in the east, via England to the U.S.A. in the West. Race may at times be 'natural***;' racism is always socially constructed and operationalized for the exclusion, oppression, victimization of the perceived 'Other' - in areas such as housing, employment, education, bank credit; in the media and entertainment, and in the global arena of international migration. Race may not always be a coherent category: racism always is, as an everyday lived experience as well as a social relation. It is the experiential aspect of racism that enables Black Women in America to emphasize difference in discussions on gender. Experiential diversity becomes the norm rather than the exception in discourses on racism. Thus the recognition of difference in J.F. Lyotard's sense - i.e., the multiplicity of voices, meanings and configurations which need to be considered when trying to understand the social world and which, supposedly, negate the possibility of any particular authoritative account (Maynard, 1994: 16) - becomes crucial to the discourses on racisms.

The challenge that the multiculturalists throw to the advocates of Eurocentrism and to the defenders of 'the canon' comes from praxis. The multiculturalists are calling for a democratic politics, a politics within the academia that will create and foster space for multiculturalism because it is the democratic thing to do once the internal coherence and integrity of each new aspect of human diversity is admitted. Thinking through a democratic politics (Phelan, 1994: 9) involves an internal critique of the centre by those who already control the levers of power. It is therefore a call not for accommodation but for a parity of esteem. At its liberal end it calls for a recognition of the validity of the claims made by the multiculturalists against oppression and marginalization, and about justice and equality that can only come through the de-centreing of the centre, i.e., the locus of power. A crucial dimension is the rejection of what J.-F. Lyotard calls the metanarratives of Western metaphysics, the stories of progress and freedom that created Western civilization and placed it at the centre of the universe. This postmodern project "requires the replacement of grand narratives not with new narratives of eternal difference. . . but with what Foucault has called "subjugated knowledges." The emergence of these subjugated knowledges entails the rejection of grand, total theory in favour of local, specific theories - theories that do not aim at tying all the strands of life and history into one knot but rather try to locate each one of us as the concrete embodiment by overlapping networks of power." (Phelan, 1994: xvi) It is a call to displace hegemonic discourses with specificity. Multiculturalism is a call for political change within institutions and within discourses. It debates the inherited epistemologies ("epistemologies are justificatory strategies," Sandra Harding) and in so doing generates political debates about the politics of knowledge. These political debates are geared towards the fostering of social change. They generate social contention precisely because they seek to revise the canon, and in the process make it multivocal and contextual. What is at stake is the appropriation of power, power to enable or facilitate the transformation of society. The common enemy is everywhere oppression. Iris Young unravels the five faces of oppression as being: "'exploitation' - the steady process of the transfer of the labour of one social group to benefit another; 'marginalization' - in which a whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination; 'powerlessness' - a position in the division of labour and the concomitant social position that allows persons little opportunity to develop and exercise skills as well as the lack of power in relation to others; 'cultural imperialism,' in which the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one's own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one's group and mark it out as the Other; and systematic violence." (Young, 1990 as summarized by Phelan, 1994: 115)

Power within itself, even when shorn of its eternal Machiavellian charm, is essentially a contested term. But at least its currency of the moment, namely empowerment, entails the creation of new political actors: it "produces active citizens where before there were none." (Phelan, 1994: 122) Within the current discourses on multiculturalism, democratic empowerment within each community and inside the broader mainstream ("the process of participation in self-definition") appears to be the preferred option, a contrast to the 1960s when Malcolm X exhorted all the Wretched of the Earth to seize power "by all means necessary."

But why the preference for empowerment? According to a Cornell University statement "Empowerment is an intentional, on-going process centred in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring, and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources" (as cited in Rappaport, 1994: 366-367). Rappaport sees diversity as inherent in empowerment. "In this view of empowerment as a process, or as a mechanism by which people gain mastery over their affairs, we assume that it will look different for different people, organizations and settings." (p. 367) The implication is that empowerment will enable the many voices of the many hitherto submerged groups to be heard. Voice is of course a metaphor for power relations, as is silence. "Thus voice means having the ability, the means to express oneself, one's mind, and one's will. If an individual does not have these abilities, means, or right, he or she is silent." (Reinharz, 1994: 180) Voice is a metaphor for freedom and power. Oppression silences diversity: empowerment on the other hand enhances it. For "there is a shared property among all those who speak their true voice - it is the different voice." (ibid: 191)

A strategy for sustaining this multivocality in the political arena encourages the building of political coalitions. The potency of these political coalitions can be variously demonstrated at mass rallies against racism in Marseilles, France and in Halle, Germany; at the footsteps of the U.S. Capitol in demonstrations for and against abortion, and on university campuses debating the ban on lesbians and gays in the military. In attracting public attention, they also provide forums for education against exclusions, choices, and against institutional fear and hatred. (Card, 1995: 195) The building of political coalitions has a further empowering effect. This lies in what Toni Cade Bambara calls "refuting the numbers game inherent in 'minority,' the possibility of denouncing the insulated/orchestrated conflict game of divide and conquer." (Bambara, 1983: vi) Incidentally, many Africans from the continent feel uncomfortable with being labelled a 'minority,' precisely because within their postcolonial nation states, within the Continent and globally they do not feel like a minority - and nor have they had any usages for majority status except as a weapon for fighting against colonial settler minority colonial rule, against internal personal dictatorships, and against apartheid in South Africa. It is also a misnomer to regard the demographic communities of women within any national boundary as a 'minority,' except by accepting that minority/majority discourses are definitions of power, not populations.

Conclusion

A Prolegomenon Towards a "Common Future"

The concept of human diversity serves as an umbrella shorthand for all those political constituencies that have emerged which focus on the concerns of particular groups who have become organized over time, primarily for self-defense but also for the extension of the frontiers of toleration and participation within communities, neighbourhoods, nations and globally. These organizations are direct heirs to the nationalist struggles, to the Civil Rights Movement and later to the women's movement. The concepts of oppression, group identity and empowerment which these movements earlier foregrounded were seized upon by new groups, including gays and lesbians, individuals with disabilities and the aged. Globally as immigration across borders increased as a result of postcolonial wars, economic collapses in the Third World, and the dissolution of Cold War empires, new contexts were added to national debates as racism against new immigrants became manifest in Western Europe and the U.S.A. Ethnic riots pitted East Germans against Mozambicans, Koreans against Black Americans in Los Angeles. More pervasively border states in the U.S.A. raised their ante against Southeast Asians and Mexican immigrants, focusing on the impact of these casual labourers, immigrants and refugees on public school and health care systems. These later struggles have been over the allocation of scarce resources. Obsolete scientific theories have contrariwise also found new reinvigoration, as racists and supremacists have fallen back on genetic theories to 'prove' the superiority/inferiority of races and ethnic groups. Two political projects have been constantly pursued by the emergent struggling forces. One has been affirmative action, a legislative agenda with legal implications at the workplace, in public places and spaces, and in public institutions. A second one has been the emergence of various paradigms that emphasize the distinctiveness and positiveness of difference. These paradigms celebrate affirmative diversity, defined by J.M. Jones as "the affirmation of the fundamental value of human diversity in society, with the belief that enhancing diversity increases rather then diminishes quality. . . . Human diversity is better embodied in the concept of affirmative diversity than in affirmative action. Although affirmative action addresses questions of social justice, it fails to acknowledge cultural differences (except in a pejorative way) and usually fails to accommodate the implications of these differences in culture for students, faculty, career goals, and the content and development of training" (Jones cited in Trickett, et al., 1994: 15). This accomodationist definition accepts the existence of different contexts and different cultures. It acknowledges these as substantial issues in their own right and not merely as platforms for special interests. This positivism, currently much favoured by psychologists, advocates a cultural-pluralism perspective that has a place for culture, race, gender, sexual orientation and disability (or different ability) in the social order. These practitioners advocate the idea of people-in-context, which formulation informs their preference for the tenn human diversity. Its heuristic value is that it extends beyond the constant terms cultural, ethnic, racial to include also age, gender and sex: it "asserts the importance of understanding group identity and group identification not only as potentially important aspects of group life, but also as markers that affect experience in the broader society as well. . . . Second, the term diversity offers some advantages over minority, oppressed and disadvantaged because it conveys a positive regard for human differences. . . . Third, because we are all people in context, the diversity concept is extended to include members of the so-called dominant culture as well. . . . In the human diversity paradigm, all populations and world-views are subject to inquiry" (Trickett et al., 1994: 23). The deconstructionist possibility is within this discourse given a purpose, namely to empower rather than to merely objectify our received categories. For as James M. Jones elegantly puts it, "The task of affirmative diversity is to discover the universal without demanding uniformity and to affirm that this difference is positive while acknowledging a potential common sense of humanity." (Jones, 1994: 43) And therein lies the possibility of our common future.
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COPYRIGHT 1997 E.J. Brill (The Netherlands)
DESCRIPTORS: Multiculturalism--Research; Culture--Research; Africa-- Social aspects FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

Review title: Evaluating 'diaspora': beyond ethnicity.

TEXT:
Recent debates on the configuration of ethnic and 'race' boundaries in an era of global transformations, have re-focused academic attention on the concept of 'diaspora'. 'Diaspora' denotes transnational movement and ties in with arguments around globalisation and the growth of non-nation based solidarities (Robertson 1992, Appadurai 1990) in the contemporary period. Debates on globalisation have identified the economic and political dismantling of national borders, as well as the growth of transnational cultural formations (Featherstone 1990, Robertson 1995). New notions of diaspora identities and experiences (in, for example, Hall 1990, Gilroy 1993, Bhabha 1990, Cohen 1993, 1997, Clifford 1994, Brah 1996) have emerged. This also follows a wider tendency to insert and promote a less essentialised and more historically and analytically informed vocabulary into the traditional concerns of 'race and ethnic relations', which have dominated the field (see, for example, Miles 1989, Anthias 1990, Anthias and Yuval Davis 1992, Hall 1990, Gilroy 1993, Mason 1994, Brah 1996). Claims have been made for the concept of 'diaspora' that require casting a critical eye over it. The term now constitutes kind of mantra, being used to describe the processes of settlement and adaptation relating to a large range of transnational migration movements (see for, example, Vertovec 1996, Baumann 1995, Nandy 1990, Parekh 1994, Safran 1991, Sheffer 1986, Smart 1987). However, it could be argued that it is an over-used but under-theorised term (Vertovec 1996).

In this paper, I shall evaluate the heuristic potential of the concept. According to Gilroy for example (1997): 'Diaspora is a valuable idea because (it is) . . . an alternative to the metaphysics of "race", nation and bonded culture coded into the body' (p. 328), and puts 'emphasis on contingency, indeterminacy and conflict' (p. 334). This is an important claim and lies alongside the view that diaspora involves a conception of identity that avoids the essentialism of much of the discussion on ethnic and cultural identities (Hall 1990). This is because diaspora refocuses attention on transnational and dynamic processes, relating to ethnic commonalities, which can recognise difference and diversity. In this paper, I draw attention to the disjunction between what the term 'diaspora' purports to do, and what in fact it often fails to do. My argument is primarily that the concept of diaspora, whilst focusing on transnational processes and commonalities, does so by deploying a notion of ethnicity which privileges the point of 'origin' in constructing identity and solidarity. In the process it also fails to examine transethnic commonalities and relations and does not adequately pay attention to differences of gender and class. This failure seriously hinders the use of the concept 'diaspora', as an enabling device, for understanding differentiated and highly diverse forms of transnational movement and settlement. The issue of gender is particularly important, given the increasing recognition of the ways in which gender, ethnicity and class intersect in social relations.

Beyond the Ethnicity and 'Race' Paradigms

Part of the reason why the diaspora concept has become so widely hailed relates to some of the perceived failures of the ethnicity and 'race' paradigms. It also relates to the influence of the postmodern versions of the diaspora, found in the influential writing of diasporic black writers like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy.

The ethnicity paradigm, like the 'race' paradigm which it often merges into, has tended to focus on processes within the nation state rather than at the transnational level. Despite the more recent interest in hybridity and syncretic cultures, the bulk of the literature in the field has been concerned, at different times, with processes of assimilation, integration and accommodation or ethnic conflict and exclusion. Where exclusion has been a dominant theme, this has tended to be restricted to those 'ethnic minorities' that are constructed in 'race' terms. In practice, it is these latter groups that have formed the bulk of interest within academic and policy discourses. Indeed, the use of the term 'ethnic minority', has tended to assume that the dominant group within the state does not possess an 'ethnicity'.

Ethnic paradigms, as heuristic devices, enable a concern with boundary formation (Barth 1969, Wallman 1979), social identity (as in Watson 1977), the cultural contents of groups (Ballard 1994), and with processes of disadvantage and exclusion (Rex 1973). However, the tendency to homogenise ethnic groups coexists uneasily with the empirical work (like that of Modood et al., 1997 and others) which shows diversities within groups in terms of class and gender locations. Yet most of the work undertaken on differentiations within such groups has come from those who critique essentialist notions of cultural identity and ethnicity (Bhachu 1988, Brah 1996, Anthias 1992a). These pay attention to class and gender location, distinctive trajectories of migration and settlement, and internal differences of power, position or claims.

With regard to the 'race' paradigm, much academic debate has argued that 'race' terms are inadequate either because racism can exist without 'race' (Balibar 1991, Anthias 1990, 1992b) or because the term is ideological and should be abandoned (Miles 1989, 1993). As an enabling device the 'race' paradigm delivers concerns with the negative categorisation of population groups, and their structural disadvantages. However, the social positioning of these groups is often not related to their migration and settlement trajectories. Their location and constitution within their country of origin (as class subjects, for example) has been seriously under-explored. The terms 'ethnicity' and 'race' turn the analytical gaze to processes of inter-group relations within particular territorial borders; an exception is the political economy approach relating to 'migrant labour' (for example, Castles and Kosack 1973, CasteIls 1975). Such terms have not enabled a focus on the symbiotic ties between migrants, the country of origin (or homeland) and the country of settlement.

There is no doubt that the impetus for the contemporary revival of the term comes from the enterprise of 'diasporic' black writers like Stuart Hall (1990) and Paul Gilroy (1993, 1997) and this paper proceeds by considering the centrality of their contributions. It then looks at a more traditional sociological approach that uses 'diaspora' as a descriptive typological tool. An influential approach that treats diaspora as a social condition and as a societal process is then examined. These two approaches are central, although there are others that stress political economy processes (for instance, Segal 1995) and the condition of 'exile' (Said 1979). For reasons of paying attention to the details of the arguments, and delineating the parameters of the two main approaches, I will focus on the work of Robin Cohen (1993, 1997) for the first usage of diaspora, and on the work of James Clifford (1994) for the second usage. I believe they present the most developed analyses within the two approaches, although within the latter the work of Stuart Hall (1990) and Paul Gilroy (1993) has been particularly important.

The Concept of Diaspora: Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

'Diaspora' references a connection between groups across different nation states whose commonality derives from an original but maybe removed homeland; a new identity becomes constructed on a world scale which crosses national borders and boundaries. The etymology of the term is the Greek word (Greek Text Omitted) meaning a scattering of seeds. Although the term is often limited to population categories that have experienced 'forceful or violent expulsion' processes (classically used about the Jews), it may also denote a social condition, entailing a particular form of 'consciousness', which is particularly compatible with postmodernity and globalisation. It is seen by some to embody the globalising principle of transnationalism (for instance, see Waters 1995).

Stuart Hall has played an influential role in the recent popularity of the term 'diaspora'. His concern, over the years, has been to reconstruct an approach to cultural identity and 'race' which avoids the pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism. The concept of diaspora emerges as a way of rethinking the issue of black cultural identity and representation away from the notion of the essential black subject (Hall 1990). Hall wishes to focus on positionings; for 'histories have their real, material and symbolic effects' (1990:226).

The diaspora experience as I intend it here, is defined, not be essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.

(Hall 1990:235)

Hall's work is useful in historicising ethnic and cultural identity, but in the process reinserts a black subject, constructed historically, whose body is reinscribed with different societal effects: the sameness here wins over the difference that Hall so clearly wants to affirm and this is largely because of the centrality of racialisation. This, to some extent, undermines a de-essentialised notion of cultural identity and does not adequately deal with the importance of inter-ethic, class and gender difference. However, the very strength of this position lies in the analysis of the interplay between historicised and differentiated cultural identities and the structural and systemic forms of subordination (and their resistance) that lie at the heart of the experiences of black subjectivities.

Gilroy's book, The Black Atlantic (1993), probably presents the most sustained theoretical defence of the concept of diaspora and has been hugely influential in encouraging writers on transnational migration and settlement to deploy the term as a heuristic device (for example, see Vertovec 1996). Gilroy's concern is to reconstruct the history of the West through the work of black intellectuals like Du Bois and Richard Wright whom he sees as inhabiting 'contested "contact zones" between cultures and histories'. Intermediate concepts like diaspora 'break the dogmatic focus on discrete national dynamics' which has characterised modern Euro-American cultural thought and reinstate the role of 'intercultural positionality' (Gilroy 1993:6). Like Hall, he rejects the notion of an essential black subject and the unifying dynamic of black culture. Instead, he relies on the concept of diaspora, as a heuristic means, to focus on the difference and sameness of the connective culture across different national black groups. The connective tissue is seen to lie in a discourse of racial emancipation, on the one hand, and the conflictual representation of sexuality, on the other, constructing communities that are 'both similar and different', or 'the changing same' to borrow Leroi Jones's term (1967). Relying for much of the argument on the hybrid but distinctive forms of music and performance, he roots the diasporic consciousness (or double consciousness, using Du Bois's famous phrase) in a relatively privileged knowledge space. Despite, however, referring to the centrality of gender and the representation of sexuality in constituting 'the changing same', Gilroy fails to give women any agency within the black diaspora and is more interested in the male gaze (see also Helmreich 1992).

Gilroy's insightful analysis of The Black Atlantic constitutes a highly original and historicised account of the continuities and discontinuities of the black cultural domain within the space of racial subordination, although it is essentially androcentric. This has been used to fuel a vast array of different conceptual uses of the term. The term has often been made to substitute theoretical work in substantive analysis. What may succeed for the black diaspora in its specificities, may not necessarily be translatable into a general theoretical tool. I will illustrate this with reference to two major contributions to the growing empirical and theoretical literature on the concept of the diaspora.

Diaspora as a Typology and the 'Fit' with Globalisation

Robin Cohen's recent and ambitious (as he acknowledges) project on global diasporas (Cohen 1993, 1997) presents some interesting and challenging ideas on ways of rethinking the issue of movements of population and new forms of ethnic organisation. Such an emphasis provides an important corrective to approaches to ethnic and national boundaries that treat them in relation to fixed territorial and political borders. It also focuses on the trajectories of migration and settlement and the reconfiguration of ethnic solidarities. The rich array of empirical case studies presented enhance the theoretical exercise of understanding such movements of peoples and cultures. My task here is to interrogate the conceptual schema that underpins this important set of foci in Cohen's work.

The groups called 'diasporas' may have travelled across territories for a range of reasons: the essential element here is a spreading from an original homeland, and diasporas are defined descriptively with reference to that origin. Diasporas will continue to identify with the original homeland (or wider ethnic category if there is no territorial homeland). The homeland that Cohen refers to is metaphoric rather than territorial; the group need not be identified with a nation state but must constitute itself as a population category, usually a nation or ethnic group.

For Cohen, the central idea behind 'diaspora' is found in the forcible scattering of peoples denoted in the book of Deuteronomy (Cohen 1993:2). Subsequent definitions have related to the Jewish dispersion to 'Babylon'. This term has been taken up also by the African diaspora. Armenians and Greeks, along with Africans and Jews, form the traditional or classic diasporas. Cohen seeks to retain the objectivist definition found in the classical diaspora notion while showing openness to modern or global aspects arising from 'mass movements of population and the slow decline of the nation state' (Cohen 1993:14).

In order to do this he lists seven criteria for allowing the term diaspora to be used by and for a group. These are: dispersal and scattering; collective trauma; cultural flowering; troubled relationship with the majority; a sense of community transcending national frontiers; promoting a return movement. He suggests (1993:22) that the old diasporic practice of sojourning has become a feature of the new global economy and that the static terms of migration theory with their emphasis on the binary process of travel from and return to are no longer particularly useful.

Cohen's typology constructs five different forms of diasporic community: victim; labour; trade; imperial; and cultural. He acknowledges that some take dual or multiple forms or change their characteristics over time. His examples are drawn from the experience of Jews as the proto-typical form; Africans and Armenians as victim; Indians as Labour; British as imperial; Chinese and Lebanese as trading; and Caribbean as cultural (Cohen 1997). A great deal of interesting material is used, and with regard to the cultural diaspora, Cohen draws on the insights of Hall and Gilroy on the Caribbean experience. However, there is an over-celebratory and at times panegyric account of diasporic success (Cohen 1997). Moreover, Cohen's work is characterised as much by a foreclosing of questions as their opening up. Such questions particularly relate to issues of difference and diversity (by treating each diaspora group as a unity), a failure to investigate inter-ethnic processes, and a lack of concern with the intersectionalities of class and gender. I will return to these problems in my general evaluation of the term. I will concentrate here on Cohen's conceptual schema, particularly the issue of typology, with reference to (a) the use of objectivist criteria and (b) the construction of unitary categories.

(a) Typology: Objectivist Criteria

Typologies may function as heuristic devices and Weber's ideal type has a number of analytical uses (see Weber 1947/1975), particularly for the purpose of comparison. However, Cohen's typology is descriptive and inductivist: in allocating a group to one of the types, there is a reliance, essentially and foremost, on the origin or intentionality of dispersal. In some cases it is the actual occupational patterning that determines allocation to a 'type' (labour, trading), in others it is 'an experience' of forceful and violent displacement (victim), or penetration (imperial), in others it is the development of a particular synthesis of cultural elements (the cultural). Such a typology provides an incommensurable comparative schema. There is no enabling device for understanding the different dimensions in relation to one another.

A problem of another order relates to the implicit explanatory potential that is given to the typological device of depending on the origin or intentionality of dispersal. One example will illustrate the problem: the factors that motivate a group to move, whether it be labour migration or forceful expulsion, do not constitute adequate ways of classifying the groups for the purpose of analysing their settlement and accommodation patterns nor their forms of identity. They would only be adequate if this motivation was seen to have necessary social effects. It is possible that force and violence may act to reproduce the attachment of the group to the homeland as a nostalgic and myth-like dream. Labour migration may lead to the search for economic rewards in order to further the economistic aims of migration and to justify the apparently voluntary nature of the exit. But these are points to investigate rather than to assume. The forms of the transnational movement have no necessary social effects and any patterns must be discovered through substantive research. The importance of the typology must be that it acts as a heuristic device for the purpose of comparison and aids in addressing such processes and others. Cohen does not provide systematic evidence of this comparative potential.

(b) Unitary Categories and the Assumption of 'Community'

In order to sustain the distinctiveness of diasporic groups from others, Cohen needs to present 'diaspora' as a unitary sociological phenomenon which is divided (as subspecies, say, of flowers or seeds), into different types. He himself provides a horticultural analogy, somewhat tongue in cheek, at the end of the book!

Diaspora formulates a population as a transnational community. The assumption is that there is a natural and unproblematic 'organic' community of people without division or difference, dedicated to the same political project(s). Cohen suggests that the sense of unease or difference faced by members of diasporic groups causes them to identify with co-ethnics in other countries. It may be that this can be shown to be the case, although why 'unease' would necessarily lead to the growth of ethnic solidarity (rather than trans-ethnic solidarity) is not explored. A notion of primordial bonding seems to lie at the heart of the 'diaspora' notion.

Cohen acknowledges that the factors that give rise to the diasporic movement will differ for different groups. Within these groups there will be different push/pull factors at different times and for different destinations. Asylum, forceful expulsion/exile, trading/labour migration, brain drain are all factors that can account for different categories within, for example, the Greek diaspora. Cohen constructs a typology distinguishing different diasporas on this kind of basis. On the basis of such differences and others, however, one could argue that his typology could be as applicable to differences within particular diasporas as it is between them.

The idea of diaspora tends to homogenise the population referred to at the transnational level. However, such populations are not homogeneous for the movements of population may have taken place at different historical periods and for different reasons, and different countries of destination provided different social conditions, opportunities and exclusions. Let us take as an example the identification of the Greek diaspora. Greeks of the diaspora include those thrown out of Asia Minor in 1922 and more recent Gastarbeiters as well as Greeks still living in Turkey and Albania. What do the Greeks in Germany who travelled as Gastarbeiters and the Greeks of Smyrna who were forcibly expelled have in common? What do they have in common with the Greeks in London, who are mainly students, professionals or ship-owners? Are Greek Cypriots members of the Greek diaspora, since they have never been part of the Greek nation state although most of them would regard themselves as part of the Greek nation? The forms of Cypriot migration to and settlement in Britain were those of other new Commonwealth migrants rather than those of Greek migrant workers to Germany and Sweden, or those of the expelled Greeks from Smyrna. The movement to America and Australia from Greece and Cyprus, however, was more similar and therefore their social position in these respective countries more in line with each other. What do migrant women who work in ethnic ghettos and do not speak the language of their country of residence (like our mothers) have in common with us (whose language is first and foremost English)? Do I need to adopt the hat or the badge? What is that badge? Who can classify me? Such questions are central, it seems to me, to any analysis: the diaspora is constituted as much in difference and division as it is in commonality and solidarity.

Diasporas are not homogeneous in another sense: they may have formed different collective representations of the group under local conditions. In addition, the extent to which they organise around cultural symbols, develop ethnic cultural organisations and promote their ethnic identity will be diverse. Different groups within the overall category will have different political projects; this may include the crosscuttings of gender, class, political affiliation and generation. In many cases, however, they may be attached to the homeland in terms of national feeling and, indeed, see their role as being to uphold the interests of their original homeland. However, the politics of the homeland (what Anderson 1995 calls a nationalism from afar) may have significant differences to that of those 'who stayed'. It may assume a heavy sense of guilt and overcompensation, a ritualistic and symbolic fervour often found in the attempt to retain the old ethnic ingredients (leaving groups in a type of time-warp). There may be differences depending on how near or far the diaspora are from the original homeland (if there is one): for example, there is some evidence that Greeks from Australia and America are less concerned with retaining the ethnic culture of the homeland than Greeks and Cypriots in Britain or France (Anthias, forthcoming).

Such continuing attachments to homeland, however, may not be an adequate reason for treating all these groupings with such an orientation as belonging to a single conceptual category. In fact one is tempted to assume that the thing that most binds them together is an attribution of origin. If this is the case it already assumes that which it purports to investigate. The explanans becomes the explanandum. The fact that a population category may be identifiable by an attributed origin (other or self), does not provide sufficient grounds for treating it as a valid sociological category. The differences within the category may be as great as those between the categories. This is not merely a theoretical matter; power hierarchies within groups cannot be addressed. The different positioning in social relations both within and between the groups, and within the wider society of settlement, fail to get addressed. The issue of gender and class formation is particularly crucial. Gender indeed is a missing term in Cohen's account of diasporic formations. I return to this issue in my general evaluation of the concept towards the end of this paper.

Diaspora as a Condition: The Nation Destabilised

The postmodern versions of diaspora (Hall 1990, Gilroy 1993, Clifford 1994, Brah 1996) denote a condition rather than being descriptive of a group. Not only is the condition one structured through the trajectory of movement but it is one which seeps into the very fabric of the modern (or postmodern) condition itself. This condition is put into play through the experience of being from one place and of another, and it is identified with the idea of particular sentiments towards the homeland, whilst being formed by those of the place of settlement. This place is one where one is constructed in and through difference, and yet is one that produces differential forms of cultural accommodation or syncretism: in some versions hybridity. To treat diaspora as a condition is to pose the problem in terms of the specificities pertaining to the process of territorial and culture shifts. Here issues around the destabilising effect of transition and movement of the individuals' cultural certainties may be explored and the ontological and epistemological effects researched.

This version of diaspora denotes a process at the holistic level and not just in terms of the group or intergroup relations; the diaspora process is organically related to globalisation and cultural mixing (or syncretism/hybridity). Transformations occur in all of the social parts and not only in the diaspora group itself. Such processes involve transnational and trans-ethnic mixing. A diasporic space is created that transgresses the boundaries of ethnicity and nationalism (see the work of Brah 1996). The problematic involved in the use of this formulation is similar to that of globalisation if not identical with it. The diasporic process is one whereby social unities around nation become destabilised. This approach is most developed in the work of James Clifford (1994).

According to Clifford's (1994) influential position, the nation state is subverted by diasporic attachments which construct allegiances elsewhere. Moreover, the diaspora category rejects the autochthonous claims of 'tribe' which stress continuity and the natural connection to the land. The diaspora claims to belongingness do not come from claims to inhabit original territory since they need the right to inhabit a different territory to their constructed and deferred homeland. This enables the diaspora to recognise the basic problem of all autochthonous claims: how long does a territory need to be inhabited by a group in order for such claims to be made?

Identity becomes more syncretic; British born Cypriots, Australian Greeks, British Blacks, Muslims and Asians, German Jews, Russian Jews, Armenian Jews, American Italians and so on. Clifford refers to this as selective accommodation: the desire to stay and be different. This challenges the nation state form as embodying a given national group and constructs it as trans-ethnic and transnational also. I will look at the idea of the global world view and therefore subversive and transgressive potential of the diaspora and its radicalising relation to the nation state, which are the central planks, I believe, of this approach.

Thinking Globally, Living Locally: Beyond Ethnicity

Clifford suggests that diasporas think globally but live locally. Such a depiction lies at the heart of much recent globalisation theory (for example, Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995). Nomads (Bradiotti 1994) and hybrids (Bhabha 1994, Pieterse 1995) have been claimed to embody the modern or postmodern condition. Such approaches suggest that the bonds of ethnic ties and the fixity of boundaries have been replaced by shifting and fluid identities. Recent research supports this view (Back 1996, Bhavnani and Phoenix 1994, Modood et al. 1997, Anthias forthcoming). Such shifts fundamentally alter the ethnic landscape. None the less, it is too easy to interpret this as the actual dismantling of ethnic imperatives across a range of identity and cultural narratives and to treat the new agents of 'diasporic space' (Brah 1996), as unproblematically throwing out their investments in the resources of ethnicity politics. For whilst, at one level, there is evidence that the cultural and identity choices of individuals and groups are becoming broader through migration and transnational movement, there is also evidence of the growth of ethnic fundamentalisms (Assad 1993, Chhachhi 1991). Also, as indicated indeed by some of Cohen's work mentioned earlier, there exists a continuation of 'ethnic' solidarities and attachments to the symbols of national belonging and continuing investment, emotionally, economically and culturally in the 'homeland' by a range of organised social groupings within transnational migration movements (also see Lemelle and Kelly 1994).

If this is the case, then the perception of diasporas as breaking 'the ethnic spectacles' with which the world was previously viewed, may vastly underestimate the continuing attachment to the idea of ethnic and therefore particularist bonds, to a new reconstructed form of ethnic absolutism. For example, to what extent can we really refer to Black Muslims or nationalist Greeks, in constructing a transnational category, as they certainly do, as thinking globally? Their legitimation and strength may certainly be gained by global connections. The legitimacy of the claims may be sought in a more global international context. However, they may be essentially reconstituting a form of local and particularist ethnic absolutism.

The emphasis on the transgressive potential of the diaspora is certainly worth exploring: the problem is that it is often asserted. For example, Clifford suggests that the diasporic condition gives rise to the recognition of the relativity of autochthonous claims in general. If this were the case, one would expect diasporic groups to be less essentialist and nationalistic with reference to questions of territorial and other political rights than those who still remain within their original homeland or nation state borders.

An illustration of Clifford's ideas here might be found in the views of the Cypriot, Turkish or Greek diasporas on questions like: are the Turkish settlers in Cyprus, brought from mainland Turkey after 1974, to be expelled if there is a solution? The Turkish Cypriots entered Cyprus in the fifteenth century - is that not long enough to give inalienable rights to claims of territory? Are the claims of those who inhabited a place before recorded history different to those who arrived by boat, train or air (as Clifford asks)? Evidence suggests in fact that diasporic Cypriots, Greeks and Turks, are just as likely to provide nationalistic and chauvinist arguments which serve the perceived political interests of their respective political representations within the nation state as those who still live in Cyprus (see Anthias 1992a, Anthias, forthcoming). There is also a concerted effort by the Cypriot State to use their diasporas as a resource for pursuing the ethnic project of Cyprus, and evidence that the Greek mainland state sees the use of the Greek diaspora as an ethnic resource (Kontos 1995). In the case of the Greek Cypriots, the desire is to use the diaspora in order to promote a solution to the Cyprus problem, and at times has included the desire to re-establish a majoritarian Cypriot State. In the case of Turkish Cypriots the diaspora is sought to promote the retention of effective separation, albeit within a weak federal structure.

Similarly, the evolution of syncretic cultural elements may take the form of tolerance to different cultures and may involve dialogue. Alternatively, it may be that the process leads to ghettoisation, ethnicisation or forms of ethnic and other fundamentalism on all sides (within the dominant group as well). There is contradictory evidence which suggests that the meaning given to syncretism may be highly variable, particularly given the rise of ethnic localisms and fundamentalisms; the panegyric must await evidence of the arrival of the 'bridegroom'!

Moreover, the postmodern category of diaspora generally fails to provide a class and gender analysis of the processes of migration, settlement and accommodation (for an exception see the work of Brah 1996). This has been an ongoing critique levelled by feminists, particularly 'black' and anti-racist feminists against research on migration and 'race' in general (hooks 1981, Carby 1982, Anthias and Yuval Davis 1992). This critique can also apply to the ungendered notion of diaspora. I shall return to the issue of class and gender (and intersectionality) in the next section.

'Diaspora' Assessed

Although there are some common features in Cohen's and Clifford's approaches there are also significant differences. Cohen provides an objectivist typology for judging whether a transnational movement constitutes a diaspora. The orientation to a symbolic homeland is a key feature for defining the category. This is indicated by the place he gives to a return movement and continuing affective bonds, including travel and investment in the homeland or ethnic group. Diasporic forms flourish in the global era, and this in turn draws out the particular strengths of the diaspora as a form of social organisation. Clifford, by contrast, has an almost diametrically opposing view. Diasporas challenge ethnicity and ethnic absolutism. Ethnicity is replaced by hybridity, certainty is replaced by critique. The cultural and territorial movement also involves a shift in world view: the diaspora think globally.

Despite these important differences in emphasis, I believe that Cohen and Clifford share two central difficulties. These I will call (a) the problem of primordiality in the retention of the essential importance of the bond to homeland, and (b) the problem of intersectionality relating to class, gender, trans-ethnic alliances and power relations.

The Problem of primordiality: Bonds that Tie and Deterritorialised Ethnicity

Diaspora generally functions as a celebration of difference and the maintenance of links with ethnic and national belongingness, with roots (despite the disclaimer that it is 'routes' that are important within the postmodern version). This tends to neglect the aspects of ethnicity that relate to boundaries of exclusion rather than boundaries constructed through identity and common experience. Since that experience will be different in different places the bonds must be those of origin rather than position/experience. The phenomenology of displacement, however, if that were the key to the category, would not necessarily always construct some notion of homeland or 'homing', to use Brah's term (1996). Whether it did would be a matter of empirical investigation at the level of the local and particular. Such work has yet to be fully undertaken and the jury is still out.

Diaspora entails a notion of an essential parent - a father, whose seed is scattered (although Cohen admits that he toyed with the idea of a more feminine version!). The original father(land) is a point of reference for the diaspora notion: it is this constant reference point that slides into primordiality, however much it is refined and reconstructed as in Clifford's work. The mythical figure of the fatherland precedes the affirmation of bonds with the siblings in other countries: it is also a sexist analogy (the seeds or sperm of the father . . . a more trivial point perhaps but . . . (see Helmreich 1992 for a critique of Gilroy's ungendered and potentially sexist use of 'diaspora' in The Black Atlantic). Organic and self-evident communities, recognised through a shared origin, are endowed in the postmodern version with 'global' eyes. Is diaspora more than a deterritorialised ethnicity?

If there is an ethnicity in the diaspora (and there clearly is), then like all ethnicities it formulates itself in relational and contextual terms; different narratives around identity and culture come into play to pursue particular political projects. Therefore, the question of the political allegiances of different agents within diaspora groups is never given. Partially, attention must be given to the ethnic projects of the nations within which they are identified: the original homeland and the country of residence. With regard to the former, some nations are reluctant to use the term diaspora to describe their emigres, for it takes on a subversive meaning in the context of the nation-building project or contestation. In contemporary Cyprus, for example, the state is reluctant to designate Cypriots living abroad as a diaspora because of the connotations this has in terms of loss of identity and unlikelihood of return. The Cypriot state, therefore, wishes to retain the use of the term 'migrant' for Cypriots abroad, even those of the second and third generations, because it wishes to retain the group. This is the result of the demographic challenge posed by the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974 and the movement of populations this has entailed within Cyprus, and from Turkey to Cyprus in the Turkish held north of the island. And yet the meanings given to 'being from Cyprus' vary greatly within the second and third generations although Cyprus is always, in one way or another, a continuing reference point (Anthias forthcoming).

Cohen notes the competition between two loyalties: to the homeland (and the co-ethnics) and to the country of settlement. At the same time Cohen suggests that the diasporic experience liberates the group from the representational and ideological chains of the 'nation'. The retention of nationalism (see Anderson 1995) and the uses to which diasporas are put by the nation state are not fully explored. Diasporas may finance national struggles and projects. For example, Jews in America may support the State of Israel, and the Irish in America may support the Irish Republican Army, Cypriots abroad may support, depending on whether they are Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots, a particular solution of the Cyprus problem. The political activities of migrants may be dominated by reference to homeland struggles (this is true of many ethnic associations of immigrants in general - see Rex 1991), although those of their children may be more likely to be focused around issues of exclusion in the country of settlement (see Anthias 1992a) or may reconstruct ethnic fundamentalist projects as modes of resistance (Afshar 1994, Saghal and Yuval Davis 1994). Also the nation state calls on its diaspora for help and sees it as a resource, investing in the maintenance of bonds and identity and giving preferential treatment to returnees.

To conclude, 'the bonds that tie' are heterogeneous and multiple. Identity and cultural narratives of belonging take on 'ethnic' forms which are themselves centrally linked to location, in terms of territory and social positioning. The diaspora notion, signalling as it does some continuity of reference with 'homeland', needs to formulate a theoretical conception of ethnicity that avoids primordiality. Indeed, one conclusion from this discussion is not so much that diaspora is an alternative to 'ethnicity', but rather that it requires a much clearer delineation of the latter's articulations.

The Problem of Intersectionality: Class, Gender, Trans-Ethnic Alliances and Power Relations

I argued earlier that unless attention is paid to difference and then material is presented to show that these differences are transcended by commonalities of one sort or another and in certain contexts, the idea of a community of Jews, Greeks or others even as 'imagined community' cannot be sustained. I have indicated in my discussions of Cohen and Clifford, that there appears to be a general failure to address class and gendered facets within the diaspora problematic. The image of the diasporic individual in Bhabha (1990) is of the cosmopolitan rootless but routed intellectual. This raises the question of class differences: what are the commonalities between a North Indian upper-class Oxbridge-educated university teacher and a Pakistani waiter or grocer? How meaningful is it to refer to them as part of the Asian diaspora in Britain let alone the Asian diaspora more globally?

For Cohen diasporas are particularly adaptive forms of social organisation and they are at a distinctive advantage in the global era: 'Compared with the members of the host society, those who belong to a diaspora characteristically have an advantageous occupational profile . . . they are less vulnerable to adverse shifts in the labour market' (1997:172). This may be true, though Cohen has not provided adequate evidence for it, but it cannot be true of all diasporas and of all the members of particular diasporas. In addition, even if this were true at the substantive level, it does not of itself say anything about the advantages of being a diaspora, though it may reflect the economic and cultural capital that members of particular territorial origins may bring with them, the opportunities or exclusions of location and the success of the strategies they have employed to counter disadvantage, such as ethnic communality and gender strategies (Anthias 1992a). The commonality constructed by racism or other factors that determine social positioning is different to that constructed by notions of the shedding of seeds. The differentiated ethnicity and cultural syncretism and the different uses to which it is put by different class categories of transnational migrants needs investigating.

Gendering the Diaspora

With regard to gender, the role of men and women in the process of accommodation and syncretism may be different. Women are the transmitters and reproducers of ethnic and national ideologies and central in the transmission of cultural rules (Anthias and Yuval Davis 1989). At the same time they may have a different relation to the nation or ethnic group since they are not represented by it and are generally in a subordinate relation to hegemonic men who are also classed (Kandiyoti 1991, Walby 1994, Anthias 1992a). Women may be empowered by retaining home traditions but they may also be quick to abandon them when they are no longer strategies of survival (Anthias 1992a, Bhachu 1988). What is clear is that they experience two sets of gender relations or patriarchal relations, those of their own classed and gendered group and those of the main ethnic group represented in the state.

To what extent do women of all social classes and groupings have access to 'global' thinking, on the one hand, and to what extent do specific gendered social relations lead to a greater incentive for grasping the global mettle, on the other? How central are women to the ethnic projects of diaspora groups? There is a great deal of evidence (Anthias and Yuval Davis 1989, Anthias 1992a, Brah 1996) that the cultural elements around gender, particularly relating to women's roles and sexuality are central concerns of ethnic projects, both inside and outside diasporas. Transnational and trans-ethnic communities of women are key areas of exploration here that have yet to be fully undertaken. However, again, central in any such exercise is the development of the understanding of the relations between gender, ethnicity and nation in order to investigate the gendered nature of diaspora groups: my argument here is that a diaspora is a particular type of ethnic category, one that exists across the boundaries of nation states rather than within them. If the 'diaspora' notion is to claim the capacity to be gendered, it must do this by clarifying the 'ethnic' dimension that lies at its heart.

The issue of gendering the diaspora can be understood at two different levels. At the first level of analysis, it requires a consideration of the ways in which men and women of the diaspora are inserted into the social relations of the country of settlement, within their own self-defined 'diaspora communities' and within the transnational networks of the diaspora across national borders. For example, some of the work done on women migrants and their descendants in employment (Phizacklea 1983, Anthias 1992a, Westwood and Bhachu 1984) within national labour markets is one facet of such a concern. Such work indicates the distinctiveness of the labour market experiences of 'diasporic' women in relation to that of men and is able to investigate the interactions of gender, ethnicity and racialisation in the labour market, for example. It may also be able to address the extent to which the cultural and structural shifts involved for such women produce more emancipatory and liberating experiences, and it may help to fight entrenched systems of gender subordination (or not). However, this focus on the distinctive experiences of diasporic women is only one level of analysis.

The other level of analysis, regarding gendering the diaspora notion, relates to an exploration of how gendered relations are constitutive of the positionalities of the groups themselves, paying attention to class and other differences within the group, and to different locations and trajectories. Such an analysis will consider the ways in which gender relations will enable a group to occupy certain economic niches, for example, or to reproduce dynamically, in a selective way (in terms of the selective accommodation that Clifford refers to) the cultural, symbolic and material relations it lives within. Here gender lies at the very heart of the social order.

I want to summarise an agenda for gendering the diaspora here:

Firstly, one set of loci could explore the extent to which ethnic cultures are constituted as travelling and syncretic cultures through rules about sex difference, gender roles, sexuality and sexism. This includes the role of the family and other institutions and discursive formations in the reproduction and dynamic transformation of central facets of culture. This also includes specific analyses of the ways in which gender relations mark the boundaries between one group and another and the extent to which determinants of 'authenticity', of being regarded as a 'true' member of the group, within transnational movements, may be defined through conformity to gender stereotypes. For example a 'true' Cypriot man is one who conforms to gender specific rules concerning sexually appropriate behaviour (Anthias 1989).

Secondly, more substantive work is needed to research the extent to which diasporic or racialised groups (like all subordinated social groups including those of class), may be subjected to two sets of gender relations: those of the dominant society and those internal to the group. For example, gender rules may construct women as mainly responsible for the domestic domain, and endow them with a particular burden of 'femininity' within dominant discourses and practices in the receiving countries, and within the diaspora. However, they may be gendered in different ways within their own ethnic groups, or countries of origin. This suggests that both the gender relations, and the ethnic cultural processes of the group, will be affected by mainstream rules about gender relations. This also entails exploring how the social and economic position of men and women, within the 'diaspora', is partially determined by the ways in which gender relations, both within the ethnically specific cultures of different groups, and within the wider society, interact with one another. This interaction has implications for both the positioning of men and women from these groups, for the whole of the group, and for social relations more generally. These gender relations may produce a particular class structuration for different migrant and ethnic minority groups, in conjunction with labour market processes and racialisation.

Thirdly, in the case of diasporic groups, women's labour market participation and their use as cheap or family labour within their own ethnic group may act to counter some of the exclusionary effects of racialised labour markets (Anthias 1983, 1992b). This use of women, which is dependent on strong familial networks, may give rise to particular forms of economic activity and adaptation (such as self-employment, small-scale family enterprises and so on). This is manifested in the development of ethnic economies, small-scale entrepreneurship, and petit bourgeois class formation. The forms of the appropriation are culturally specific, however, and work in interplay with local markets (Anthias 1983). They may lead to particular forms of class structuration within the migrant group itself. Researching such issues more extensively may develop understanding of the different incorporation of men and women within the diaspora and the differences between minority ethnic groups.

Fourthly, a further set of loci, relates to issues of state and nation. Some analyses have suggested that women may have a different relation to the nation, and the nationalist project, as well as to globalisation processes. For example, in my own work, I have argued that women may be related to the project of the nation in diverse ways: as mothers of patriots, as symbolic of boundaries and as carrier of culture (for an analysis see Anthias and Yuval Davis 1989). Women are often used to symbolise the nation, depicting it as a woman mourning her loss. One example is found in the case of Cyprus (Anthias 1989). After the 1974 coup and Turkish invasion of the island, posters appeared everywhere of a black clothed woman weeping, but bravely with fist held high, and the caption underneath read 'Cyprus, our martyred motherland'. How does diasporic positionality relate to these processes?

A further dimension of such a set of foci would explore the multi-faceted relations of gender and the state. On the one hand, women may be constructed by the state as members of collectivities, institutions or classes. They may be seen, alongside men, as participants in the social forces that set the state its given political projects in any specific historical context (Anthias and Yuval Davis 1989), and as an integral category within wider social forces. On the other hand, they may be relegated to the private sphere and be a special focus of state concerns. This may be exemplified by special rules denoting their role in human reproduction, by particular kinds of ideological and discursive positioning, and by particular forms of economic incorporation. Furthermore, diasporic women may be constructed as outside the proper boundaries of the nation, and through racialisation, may be positioned in a particularly disadvantageous position in social relations, having limited rights to citizenship (Anthias and Yuval Davis 1989).

The kinds of loci for gendering the diaspora, suggested above, pinpoint the need, in substantive research, for a framework that pays full attention to the centrality of gender on the one hand, and to intersectionality, on the other. Firstly it may be possible to see ethnicity, gender and class as crosscutting and mutually reinforcing systems of domination and subordination, particularly in terms of processes and relations of hierarchisation, unequal resource allocation and inferiorisation (Anthias 1996, 1998). Racialised or diasporic working-class women may be particularly subordinated, through an articulation of social divisions, which produces a coherent set of practices of subordination within a range of social, economic and political contexts. Secondly, the intersections of ethnicity, gender and class may construct multiple, uneven and contradictory social patterns of domination and subordination; human subjects may be positioned differentially within these social divisions. For example, white working-class men may be seen to be in a relation of dominance over racialised groups, and over women, but may themselves be in a relation of subordination in class terms. This leads to highly contradictory processes in terms of positionality and identity. The exploration of reinforcing aspects of the divisions, and their contradictory articulations, opens up fundamental political questions also. In other words the discussion of connecting social divisions is not purely theoretical. It has a direct relevance in terms of how inequalities, identities and political strategies are conceptualised and assessed.

Trans-Ethnicity

Diaspora has a transnational referent: that is certain. But its capacity to be trans-ethnic in terms of forging solidary bonds with crosscutting groups, both from within the dominant category or with other groups also on the margins, is more difficult to sustain. A truly trans-ethnic solidarity must reject all forms of ethnic fundamentalism, for it requires dialogue. If for Cohen, diasporic groups are old forms of social organisation that precede and will outlive the nation state and particularly 'fit' with the new global era, then it is the old solidaristic bonds of a deterritorialised ethnicity that are central: trans-ethnicity is not on the agenda. If for Clifford and others from within the postmodern frame, to borrow Ali Rattansi's words (Rattansi 1994), the diasporic condition leads to breaking the essentialised mould of the nation and the indigene, then why is the theme of home and homing such a powerful metaphor in this approach?

To what extent is the hailing of the commonality of black diaspora across space (found in the work of Gilroy 1993), conducive to forging inter-ethnic bonds between Caribbeans and other groups who share a social and economic position within a particular nation state and across the boundaries of nation states? Asians and Afro Caribbeans are both racialised albeit in different ways. To claim transnational bonds for the African diaspora may function to politically weaken transethnic bonds with other groups sharing a more local or national context of contestation and struggle. The question is then raised about the capacity of the diaspora claim for entailing the political mobilisation of racialised, subordinated or oppressed groups within nation states. It also raises the question of the forms of political mobilisation, in an international context, if they are to be mediated by claims to ethnic commonality which may have precedence over struggles around economic and other material resources.

Regarding trans-ethnicity as hybridity there are a number of difficulties that I have explored elsewhere (Anthias 1997), particularly with regard to the conception of 'culture' that is involved. The main problems relate to the assumption that non-diasporic ethnic culture is itself non-hybrid, and constituted as an essence; that cultural elements can all freely mix through the voluntaristic agency of individuals; that all cultural components are compatible and therefore a pick and mix of elements is possible; that all components of the cultural melange are equal in terms of power and that all subjects have equal access to the totality of cultural components. A range of questions are then raised:

1. Under what conditions is a synthesis of cultural elements possible?

2. Which elements of culture become destabilised?

3. To what extent do groups seek to affirm their existing identity in the face of threat by the receiving culture?

4. Which social groups are most reluctant to negotiate their cultural rules and which aspects of culture do they wish to protect?

5. Are some aspects of culture more difficult to 'mix'?

6. How important are the institution of the family and kinship, the position of women and religious and moral rules, particularly around sexuality, for this?

7. What are the difficulties encountered in terms of 'translation'?

8. To what extent is there a truly politically radicalising potential in this 'condition' and what are the different forms that the condition takes?

Conclusion

Through an examination of some of the terms that are prominent in research on issues of transnational migration and settlement, it is evident that the categories we use have implications for defining the bounds of the object and the social relations around it.

The resurrection of the old term 'diaspora' has been partially prompted by the impasse that the notions of 'racial and ethnic minorities' created with their emphasis on inter-group processes and their static notions of culture and difference. Diaspora draws part of its impetus from the difficulties identified with existent ethnic and 'race' paradigms, particularly with regard to recognising highly differentiated transnational population movements and synthetic or 'hybrid' forms of identity.

Diaspora, however, has by no means replaced nor indeed could it replace a concern with ethnicity. Indeed, my discussion has indicated that diaspora itself relies on a conception of ethnic bonds as central, but dynamic, elements of social organisation. More theoretical work is needed to rethink the notion of 'ethnicity' that lies at its heart. In addition definitions of the object of academic and policy issues in ethnic terms continues. Although there has been much critical discussion about the shortcomings of ethnicity paradigms (see, for example, Omi and Winant 1986, Gilroy 1987) and of the term 'ethnic minority', the newest survey from the Policy Studies Institute is called 'Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Diversity and Disadvantage' (Modood et al. 1997). This exemplifies the extent to which, in Britain, the term 'ethnic minority' (and indeed minority ethnic), a shorthand for New Commonwealth migrants and their children, is alive and well.

The 'race' paradigm, one could argue, is no longer as dominant as it was ten years ago. That 'race' as a biological marker of difference, has no genetic basis, is generally acknowledged. 'Race' constitutes a taxonomy of groups in racist discourse, but also enables, some have argued (such as Omi and Winant 1986), the identification of population groups that are subjected to forms of prejudice, discrimination and other forms of racially constituted violence and subordination at the individual, systemic and institutional levels. 'Race' may also be an important component of identity (Gilroy 1987). So although 'race' does not exist as a scientific or epistemic category nor is it representational of the 'real', it is none the less a discursive category with real effects (Anthias and Yuval Davis 1992, Goldberg 1993).

It has also been claimed that 'race conscious' policies have undesirable unintentional effects in reifying and reproducing the very categories they wish to correct (see Anthias 1994, Appiah 1992). They fix individuals in groups and assume that they are positioned in one or another 'race' (see Solomos and Back 1996, Solomos 1993 for useful accounts of recent approaches to 'race' and racism in Britain).

The concept of 'diaspora', however, cannot replace a concern with racialised social relations. I have argued in fact that 'diaspora' turns the analytical gaze away from the dimensions of trans-ethnic relations informed by power hierarchies and by the cross-cutting relations of gender and class. The relationship between forms of exclusion, and indeed differentiated inclusion, and the emergence of diasporic solidarity and political projects of identity, on the one hand, and dialogue (as in hybridisation), on the other, are important loci for research. Such hybridisations may be uncomfortable as well as empowering, alienating as well as emancipatory. The contours of these need much more research. The research needs to be undertaken not only in terms of 'cultural syncretism' but also in terms of the relations of subordination and exclusion embodied in 'ethnic', 'race', class and gender processes.

'Diaspora' has turned the gaze to broader social relations that can encompass politics, economy and culture at the global, rather than national level. It pays attention to the dynamic nature of ethnic bonds, and to the possibilities of selective and contextual cultural translation and negotiation. However, the lack of attention to issues of gender, class and generation, and to other intergroup and intra-group divisions, is one important shortcoming. Secondly, a critique of ethnic bonds is absent within diaspora discourse, and there does not exist any account of the ways in which diaspora may indeed have a tendency to reinforce absolutist notions of 'origin' and 'true belonging'. Finally, the lack of attention given to transethnic solidarities, such as those against racism, of class, of gender, of social movements, is deeply worrying from the perspective of the development of multiculturality, and more inclusive notions of belonging. For a discourse of antiracism and social mobilisation of a transethnic (as opposed to transnational) character, cannot be easily accommodated, within the discourse of the diaspora, where it retains its dependence on 'homeland' and 'origin', however reconfigured. Unless used with caution, it may close the space of interrogating inter-ethnic allegiances within the nation state, the systematic appraisal of forms of racism, and the problems of anti-racist strategy, both within, and outside, national borders. It fails to provide a radical critique of ethnic rootedness and belonging, as exclusionary mechanisms, in social relations. It also fails to provide a systematic theorisation of the intersections between ethnicity, gender and class.

The critical eye I have cast on the notion of diaspora indicates that the concept of 'diaspora' can only act as a heuristic advance if it is able to overcome the very problems found in earlier notions of ethnicity. It therefore needs to be formulated within a paradigm of 'social divisions and identities' (Anthias 1996, 1998) that is able to treat collective solidaristic bonds as emergent and multiple, and to acknowledge the political dynamics of these processes. Such an approach requires looking at the location of 'ethnic' solidary bonds within other ontological spaces, such as those of gender and class, and must pay full attention to issues of power. A refining and reworking of the terms we use is urgent, but, as we have seen, given the complexity of the phenomena, it is not an easy task. Clearing the space for such an enterprise is but a beginning.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank three anonymous referees for their comments on the paper.

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Biographical note: FLOYA ANTHIAS is Professor of Sociology and Head of Sociology at the University of Greenwich. She has written extensively on issues of 'race', ethnicity, migration and gender. She is currently completing her latest book, on the social division of identity (Macmillan) and writing up a research project on British Cypriot and British Asian identities.

Address: School of Social Sciences, University of Greenwich, London.
COPYRIGHT 1998 British Sociological Association Publication Ltd. (UK)
DESCRIPTORS: Culture--Analysis; Ethnicity--Social aspects; Social classes --Analysis; Israel and the Diaspora--Social aspects FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

Review title: The impact of 'Bell Curve' ideology on African American public policy.

TEXT:

INTRODUCTION

Reading The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994), I was interested in their findings, but equally interested in what motivated them to write this work. In that context, I discovered what may pass for its rationale in the not-so-transparent proposal they make to eliminate affirmative action in Chapters 19 and 20. In one place, for example, the authors say, "The assumption of genetic cognitive equality among the races has practical consequences that require us to confront the assumption directly."(1) Then, they critique the policy of affirmative action in the following terms:

In coming to grips with policy, a few hard truths have to be accepted. First there are no good ways to implement current job discrimination law without incurring costs in economic efficiency and fairness to both employers and employees. Second, after controlling for IQ, it is hard to demonstrate that the United States still suffers from a major problem of racial discrimination in occupations and pay.(2)

The authors go on to ask the question, "inasmuch as cognitive ability is related to job performance, and as minority workers are entering professions with lower ability distributions than whites, is there evidence for lower average performance for minority workers than for whites?"(3) Of course, the writers proceed to prove the affirmative of this question referencing data from teacher competency exams and pipe fitter and plumber exams, and then propose to eliminate all affirmative action regulations in the following concluding statement:

If tomorrow all job discrimination regulations based on group proportions were rescinded, the United States would have a job market that is ethnically fairer, more conducive to racial harmony, and economically more productive, than the one we have now.(4)

Without discussing these assumptions on their merits, I believe that we are given to understand by the authors that insofar as they feel the presumption of intellectual equality is wrong, this justifies the exposure of Blacks to the labor market, unprotected against racial discrimination and in a manner that weights their theorized intellectual level to their actual job performance and pay. They infer, then, that the racial sorting of the market in a manner that keeps Blacks at the bottom of the wage structure, and thus the opportunity structure, in America is fair. This political use of their theory of intellectual inferiority deserves further examination, in that it works to legitimize their claims and therefore to affect the course of state policy in this area.

ORIGINS OF BELL CURVE IDEOLOGY

In his work on the origins of the racial hygiene movement, Robert Proctor suggests that from the earliest times, the use of science was employed in the service of the political objectives of government. This gave the government additional license, in addition to its legal authority, to act in ways deemed justifiable by virtue of "scientific evidence." It also meant that appeals to "science" buttressed other claimants wanting to acquire or maintain racial or cultural power. As Proctor put it, "the appeal to science lent a certain authority to ideological pronouncements."(5)

An early example of this was that in 1853 when Arthur Comte de Gobineau published Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race, he insisted that his view of races - which proclaimed the inferiority of Africans - was "scientific." Of course, his objective was to assert the superiority of Europeans over non-European peoples, and in so doing, to give moral authority to their claims to rule large parts of the globe. But other subsequent developments gave considerable impetus to this trend.

For example, Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection spread throughout the scientific world at the turn of the century and were quickly taken up by social scientists and social planners as justification for the most inhumane treatment of the European lower classes. These ideas found their way to America where they were utilized by such industrialists as Andrew Carnegie to support the morality of capitalism and its elevation of profit over the means used to acquire it.

In 1895 Alfred Ploetz became the father of German theories of racial hygiene, shortly after Bismarck's unification of the Prussian empire into modern Germany. Ploetz was interesting because of his view that the emerging social policies of the day designed to reduce unemployment, to insure against disease, to support old age, or to construct worker cooperatives were all, in fact, socialist. These policies, he held, constituted impediments to maintaining the purity of the race by allowing weaker elements of humanity to survive and prosper. These policies, he argued, therefore posed a contradiction between the goals of the state in this regard and the brute facts of nature. As we now know, his ideas were the advance theories of the German Third Reich of the 1940s.(6)

That is why Robert Proctor's statement rings so true when he says, "Scientific racism was an explanatory program, but it was also a political program, designed to reinforce certain power relations as natural and inevitable."(7) The "naturalness" he referred to, in the exercise of power, of course, was true as long as the power relations were exercised in the interest of the dominant ethnic or racial group. But Ploetz observed that the objectives of the state to shore up even a racially compatible lower class were ultimately against the laws of nature.

AMERICAN RACE CONFLICT AND INTELLIGENCE

Two factors are derivative of the historical legacy of scientific racism and classism in the United States: the persistence of the assault on Black human capability as a mechanism in the maintenance of White supremacy and the heightening of this assault in periods when structural White supremacy turns into White cultural nationalism.

At every stage of the development of the Black community in America, there has been a persistent debate over the intellectual capabilities of Blacks compared with Whites. For instance, in 1953, in the wake of school desegregation battles launched by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the questions raised by opponents of racial integration was whether or not Blacks were intellectually capable of learning with White students. As a result, a statement from 30 American social scientists was submitted to the Supreme Court suggesting that the available scientific conclusion held that perhaps all of the variation between the races was a result of environmental differences.(8) This conclusion built upon those of scholars in other organizations such as the American Anthropological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, which addressed the Nazi phenomenon in the late 1930s.

Then, 2 years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated schooling, Professor Frank McGurk of Villanova University professed to find significantly lower performance by Blacks on so-called intelligence tests regardless of their socioeconomic status. Again scholars mobilized to denounce the finding as unscientific because it did not allow for the overlap among the races and did not clarify the very definition of race itself.(9) A most important rejoinder was made by Bernard Hennessy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who stated that if differences exist between Blacks and Whites, the differences have no relevance to the ideas of liberal democracy, which do not require citizens possess equal physical abilities, only that they be given equal legal protection and public services. Hennessy thus reclaimed the conflict from cultural nationalists and reconceptualized it in the framework of political democracy.

Then, at the end of the Nixon administration's first term, Richard J. Herrnstein published an article in Atlantic Monthly suggesting that heredity explained 80%-85% of the variation in IQ.(11) To this, Leon J. Kamin, professor of psychology at Princeton University replied straightforwardly, "There exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable."(12) Again, Kamin asserted that a partial reason for his conclusion (so at odds with the prevailing scientific opinion) was that the IQ test had served historically "as an instrument of oppression against the poor - dressed in the trappings of science, rather than politics."(13) Kamin's view was rooted in the political environment in which IQ testing was developed at the turn of the century, the tortuous history of which revealed the attempt of the dominant class to prove its biological superiority over others in order to justify its control over resources.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCE EXPLANATION

The fundamental issues in the differences between Blacks and Whites have always been the difference between European and African peoples and their culture, the holistic referential that encompasses body type, history, and so on, upon which the modern stereotypes have been based. Therefore, to select out one human feature from this matrix of difference to compare with another group would appear to be an artificial enterprise, bound to yield the most questionable results.

In any case, consider that what many psychologists regard as the so-called 15-point differential in "intelligence" that Murray and Herrnstein support - what might be called a European knowledge-based construct for intelligence - is only a manifestation of cultural difference. This implies that although a "developmental" inference can be drawn, it is not the development of Black intellectual capability that is at issue, but the development of knowledge about Euro-American civilization.

The mix of African culture within both the physiology and the social life of Blacks has been inescapably confirmed. Melville Herskovits's analyses of Caribbean culture and Black life in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s teased out what he called "vibrant Africanisms." But even modern observers of Southern American life discover again and again the overlay of African cultural practices in Black lifestyles. He says the following:

When we are confronted with psychological studies of race relations made in utter ignorance of characteristic African patterns of motivation and behavior, or with sociological analyses of Negro family life which make not the slightest attempt to take into account even the chance that the phenomenon being studied might in some way have been influenced by the carry-over of certain African traditions . . . we can but wonder about the value of such work.(14)

Herskovits's view has credibility both from the evidence of his significant research contribution and from the continuing manifestations of African cultural practices among African Americans, whether the subject is the care of the home such as the "dirt yard broom-clean" tradition of South Carolina Black communities, or the cuisine of Louisiana, or the religious "spiritualist" churches that exist, or any one of a number of traditions. In fact, archaeological investigators have found that Blacks in America routinely kept aspects of African culture alive in the slave institution.(15)

It means, simply, that African and European cultures are different. It could also mean something less benign, that the specific way in which Blacks have been socialized in America is different from Whites and that any test for intelligence constructed today is a one-way construct of values and social experiences that inadequately captures the Black way of being, which includes a psycho-cultural perspective that influences the way in which Black people order the world. These and other explanations are wholly plausible without resorting to the mystical differences in innate intelligence that the IQ test purports to measure.

This is profoundly important because it is the differential cultural frame of reference and socialization by life experiences between the races that has laid the basis for differences in social perceptions of things such as police behavior, expectations of educational performance, bank lending practices, and other discrete aspects of daily racial encounters that also shape the political attitude of Blacks about the fairness in society at large. So, the linkage between differential culture as the basis of a differential political outlook has also been well established.

As Herskovits has also inferred, no research has examined the historical impact of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of subordination that have amounted to the inferiorization of the Black self. Is it possible that another dimension of difference is the accumulation of historical experiences that have socialized one group of people to mastery and another to inferiority? Is it logical to expect that these experiences, which, after all, have shaped the psychology of Whites, would somehow be less than powerful in the shaping of the Black personality? In any case, we must entertain a cultural explanation of the so-called differences in the White and Black mind, given the obvious answers to these questions.

POLITICS AND POLICY OF WHITE NATIONALISM

We have suggested that at the turn of the century, scientific racism was compatible with the rise of European nationalism. Likewise, American imperialism was in process and it was undergirded by an ideology of American superiority, as indicated by a speech by Senator J. Beveridge of Indiana:

We will not renounce our part in the mission of the race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . He has made us [our race] the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. And of all our race, he has marked the American people as His chosen Nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.(16)

This sentiment, as is well known, promoted American incursions into the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. Here, both state and nation were unified in the conduct of imperialism.

Nevertheless, one of the traditional tensions is between state as representing governmental authority and nation as represented by the dominant racial or ethnic group. Again, the German example is illustrative. The aim of those directing the National Socialist movement in the 1930s was not to reaffirm the absolutist concept of the state, but to rearrange the state apparatus - indeed to minimize the state - in a manner that would make it subservient to the objectives of the yolk, or the dominant German ethnic nation. Alfred Rosenberg, regarded as a chief contemporary ideologist for the Nazi Party said the following:

The National Socialist movement is the moulded strength of twentieth-century thought; moulded for the security of the collective German Volk and of its blood and character. The state, as a most powerful and virile instrument, is placed at the disposal of the movement, and its life-strength and powers are continuously renewed by the movement in order that it remain flexible and capable of resistance while avoiding the dangers of bureaucratization, petrification and estrangement from the Volk.(17)

This striking explanation of the intended relationship between the state and a nationalist movement also seems to capture the motivation for the current era in American politics where government is seen as "estranged from the people," overly bureaucratized, and, therefore, unrepresentative of the peoples' values and objectives. The result has been a massive attempt to discipline and savage its structure in a manner that would reduce its power and resubordinate its objectives to the will of the dominant racial class.

THE MODERN ERA

The above thought presages the fact that the past 2 decades have seen the emergence of a new era of "White nationalism."(18) This political movement has been fueled in part by the feeling on the part of a significant segment of the White population that their interests were subordinated during the period when the needs of disadvantaged groups were given attention in the 1960s and 1970s. These Whites feel that their interests should become, once again, the clear priority for national goals. And they are willing to subordinate the goals of other groups in society in order to achieve this. It is a reaction to the politics of the past and present that are perceived to challenge the social and class position of Whites, especially White males.

Thus they have reacted to the following factors:

1. The civil rights movement

2. The women's movement

3. Non-White immigration

4. Economic factors: Oil shock recession of the early 1970s and "stagflation" of the mid-1970s

5. Loss of American prestige in Vietnam and the Iranian Hostage incident

These factors were largely responsible for the development of the conservative movement in the 1970s.

Accordingly, President Reagan shifted funding from the social programs to the military budget, giving the elite a $600 billion tax cut, the largest in history (creating a massive federal budget deficit). He also rejected mainstream Black leadership and unsuccessfully attempted to foster the development of a new conservative Black leadership class to replace mainstream Black leaders.

Subsequently, George Bush failed both as a caretaker of the "Reagan revolution" and to complete the social/cultural agenda of the White nationalist movement.

However, the 1994 election is an indication that the forces of White nationalism have begun to congeal in the political culture through the dominant political institutions of the country. The pattern of turnout in the election further defined it as a White, conservative, Republican movement, as exit poll data showed the following pattern:(19)

* 63% of White males led the vote for Republicans

* 55% of White females also voted for Republicans

* Only 15% of Blacks voted for Republicans

And whereas the Reagan administration represented the capture of Executive power by the conservative movement, the election of 1994 represented the capture of the Congressional power. The former sought to implement the fiscal revolution and the latter seeks to complete basic changes in the national social agenda. Some of the key policy goals of the conservative political movement were contained in the campaign themes of 1994 contained in the Republican party document "Contract with America." In it, the following themes were most salient:(20)

* Conservatism: symbolic vote against government and reduction or elimination of government social programs

* Nationalist themes: a speaker of the House who espouses a doctrine of restoring "American civilization" and how to redirect national policy toward the restoration of American values

* Institutional method: redressing the balance of power by passing punitive legislation that has the effect of dismantling governmental power and penalizing those deemed "unworthy" to receive tax subsidy

In the 1990s, the impact of the downward pressure on the wage structure of the average family has caused many Americans to question the persistence of the opportunity structure that undergirds the American myth of progress. Just as important, it has made many White Americans feel that the cost of social justice is too onerous in that it appears to impinge upon their individual well-being, leading to the revival of racial scapegoating and the mechanisms responsible for enabling the disadvantaged to compete against them for social goods.

MYTH: LOSING GROUND WITH SOCIAL PROGRAMS

This, in my view, explains the attempt of Charles Murray in an earlier book, Losing Ground, to assert a patent untruth - that social programs formed in the 1960s not only did not work but also were injurious to the Blacks and others whom they were intended to serve.(21) While alleging the impotence of the Great Society program of the Johnson administration, Murray never once explained how the Blacks, the beneficiaries of many of these programs, developed a middle class so swiftly between 1960 and 1980. In fact, the Black middle class emerged through a combination of high rates of economic growth and historic access to government programs such as the "Model Cities administration" and other programs that provided a middle-class salary for a significant segment of the Black population.

Thus Murray and Herrnstein are in the tradition of those who have sought to use pseudoscientific findings of differences in intellectual capability between Blacks and Whites as a political tool to impede the straggle for racial equality. Because Murray, in particular, made a previous effort to assign social programs to the dust bin of history, he infers via the most recent effort, The Bell Curve, that the social programs would not work in any case because the populations for which they were intended could not benefit because of their biological inferiority. Thus lower income people and non-Whites are intellectually unworthy to receive government assistance. This view has gained public legitimacy because of the current nationalist political context within which this newest attempt at the inferiorization of African origin people is set.

What has begun to emerge as a consequence of this movement is the revival of overt appeals to racial stereotyping and scapegoating. Resentment began to build over the presumed advantages reaped by the disadvantaged groups in society, such as Blacks, other non-Whites, women, elderly, and the disabled, over traditionally dominant Whites. This "free radical" resentment, began to search for a rational ideology. One was that these groups were assisted by government, which in many cases was helping unworthy groups. And although there are public opinion measures that suggest the depth of this White resentment, there are no adequate measures to capture the venom spewed daily by the media, especially the dominant talk shows that are a popular base for the dissemination of the conservative nationalist ideology.(22) In this politicized atmosphere, The Bell Curve ideology, masquerading as science, constitutes a justification for the punitive attacks on the poor and the non-White as a part of their subordination. The Bell Curve ideology is, furthermore, a convenient and popular rationale for the unworthiness of certain groups to participate in the fruits of American society - and it serves the interests of those who want to reclaim the initiative of public attention and resources.

POLICY IMPACT

The various manifestations of the politics in Congress are those that result in the coded discussions of race and poverty and the selective withdrawal of resources from certain populations - the classic definition of institutional racism. Major implication: moral unworthiness of recipients of government as a basis or rationale for denying federal resources. This has resulted in a series of specific punitive policy proposals and decisions that have a strong racial subtext:

1. The crime bill emphasis on prisons and punishment

2. The punitive welfare "reform" bill, opportunity society

3. Republican destruction of the 1993 budget "stimulus package"

4. The moral proposal that the condition of Black and poor people would be assuaged if only they would assume "personal responsibility" for their condition

5. Constitutional challenges to civil rights in the Supreme Court

6. Battle over affirmative action

7. Cutback in foreign aid, specifically Africa aid

CONCLUSION

First it is possible to conclude that at all ends, The Bell Curve assumption of the firm relationship between IQ and social achievement and national progress is fallacious. This is assertable from both Black history and the history of America. People of all stripes have achieved miraculous things for themselves and for American society as a whole quite without regard to their IQ.

We were not cognizant of the IQ of Sojourner Truth, or Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X, but they helped to give Blacks dignity as men and women and enhanced their freedom. Likewise, we know little of the IQ of that generation of Blacks who were enslaved at the time of their manu-mission in 1865, but we know that they have made substantial progress against considerable odds in just over one century and a third.

And there are many, many individuals who have achieved in every conceivable sector of American life on a daily basis, and their IQ is all but insignificant. Moreover, there are now 1.1 million young Black people in American colleges and universities, poised to straggle for a rightful place in American society, and probably most will be successful, despite any calculation of their IQ.

What we know from the work of social and behavioral scientists such as Dollard et al. as early as 1939 is that when people become anxious about their future, and they do not understand what is happening to them, they strike out at the most visible, and usually the weakest, targets.(23) In this sense, if the performance of the economy does not improve as it globalizes, and internal economic competition among various groups intensifies, the recipe for internal strife will continue. Therefore, it is imperative that the causes of the current sources of American fear and social instability are presented correctly because of the possibility of civil instability and perhaps even civil unrest and more.

Second, the destruction of the liberal tradition should be regarded as more than a historical footnote. The liberal tradition has been the bedrock of the development of a pluralistic and democratic society. It has provided the policies for what we have come to consider the "social safety net" for the elderly, the young, and those suffering from many types of disadvantage. To that extent, the liberal notion of progress and social responsibility has prevented America from developing absolutely impregnable barriers to social mobility and has held out the principle that all, in fact, are entitled to prosper. This principle has been the social cement that has bound up the myth of American multiracial democracy, and with its destruction, America faces an uncertain future.

On the other hand, White conservative nationalism leads in a different direction. It could not only accomplish the elimination of much of the civil legal regime, it could also threaten to eliminate the distribution of considerable resources to strategic groups in society. In so doing it could weaken the social infrastructure and cause the emergence of a violent reaction among those disadvantaged. However, that sector of the White nationalist movement that is armed, the militant militias, other paramilitary groups, and, increasingly, ordinary citizens, would be poised to respond violently, leading potentially to civil unrest, but possibly also racial warfare.

Thus the stakes of The Bell Curve ideology are substantial, in that they appear to legitimize the dangerous and authoritarian drift of the conservative nationalist movement, all of which constitutes a reason to subject it to political as well as other forms of rigorous analysis.

NOTES

1. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press), 197.

2. Ibid., p. 480.

3. Ibid., p. 492.

4. Ibid., p. 505.

5. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988).

6. Ibid., pp. 14-17.

7. Ibid., p. 13.

8. "Does Race Really Make a Difference in Intelligence?" U.S. News and World Report, October 26, 1956, 74.

9. "Race Intelligence and Equality." New Republic, December 24, 1956, 10. See also Frank C. J. McGurk, Comparison of the performance of Negro and White high school seniors on cultural and non-cultural psychological test questions, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1951.

10. Ibid.

11. Richard J. Herrnstein, "IQ." Atlantic Monthly, September 1971, 57.

12. Leon J. Kamin, "The Science and Politics of IQ," Social Research 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 387.

13. Ibid., p. 588.

14. Melville J. Herskovits, The New World Negro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press/ Minerva Press, 1969), 121.

15. "Scientists Find Slaves Kept African Culture." New York Times, September 15, 1991, 43.

16. Senate, Senator J. Beveridge, Speech, Congressional Record, 61st, 2nd, 1909-1910, pp. 6604-6605.

17. Robert Pois, ed. Race and Race History and Other Essays by Alfred Rosenberg (New York: Harper Tourchbook, 1970), 192.

18. Ronald Walters, "White Nationalism in The United States." Without Prejudice vol. 1, no. 1 (EAFORD Paper). The International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Geneva, Switzerland, 1987.

19. CBS/New York Times, November 10, 1994. Poll cited in Thomas Eagleton, "Race is a Factor in Our Politics," St. Louis Post Dispatch, November 20, 1994, p. 3B.

20. Ed Gellespie and Bob Schellhas, eds. Contract with America (New York: Times Books/Random House, Republican National Committee, 1994).

21. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

22. The March 1995 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 75% of all respondents were opposed to racial preferences to make up for past discrimination; 81% of Whites, 46% of Blacks. Furthermore, 57% of Whites and 19% of Blacks agreed with the statement that preferences for minorities and women result in less opportunity for White males. But 66% of Blacks and 34% of Whites believed that this was a price worth paying. The Washington Post/ABC Survey of 1,524 respondents, March 19, 1995, Rich Morin, Polling Department, Washington Post, Washington, DC.

23. John Dollard, L. W. Doob, N. E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and R. R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939).

RONALD WALTERS obtained his B.A. in history and government at Fisk University, and an M.A. in African studies and a Ph.D. in international affairs at American University. He has served as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association, is founder of the National Congress of Black Faculty, and is the past president of the African Heritage Studies Association and on the editorial boards of many professional publications. He is the author of over 100 articles and four books, among which is included Black Presidential Politics in America (State University of New York Press, 1989), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize (1990) of the American Political Science Association and Best Book Award of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) for 1990. His most recent work: Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora (Wayne State University Press, 1993) similarly won the NCOBPS Best Book award. He currently serves as chairman of the Political Science Department at Howard University.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Sage Publications Inc.
DESCRIPTORS: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life; African Americans--Psychology and mental health; Race-- Psychological aspects; Racism--Social aspects
FILE SEGMENT: AI File 88

Review title: To turn as on a pivot: Writing African Americans into a history of overlapping diasporas

JOURNAL CODE: GHRV
DOCUMENT TYPE: Feature
LANGUAGE: English

RECORD TYPE: Fulltext; Abstract
WORD COUNT: 13218

LENGTH: Long (31+ col inches)
DIALOG(R)File 484:Periodical Abstracts Plustext (c) 1999 Bell & Howell. All rts. reserv. 02438969 SUPPLIER NUMBER: 95253197 (THIS IS THE FULLTEXT)
ABSTRACT:
African-American history and the limited scope it was allowed in the first half century of the "American Historical Review" are examined. Recent work in the field is discussed.

TEXT:

Two and a half decades after the appearance of the American Historical Review's inaugural issue, Benjamin Brawley authored A Social History of the American Negro, in which he wrote, "other races have come...but it is upon this one [blacks] that the country's history has turned as on a pivot."(1) The son of a leading post-Civil War black educator and clergyman, Brawley received one of the best educations available to men of his time--an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta, a graduate degree from Harvard University, and postgraduate training at the University of Chicago--and became a noted author, minister, and professor. By his death in 1939, he had written a dozen books, garnered the respect and admiration of members of the historical profession, and served as one of the first associate editors of the Journal of Negro History.(2) Thus it is all the more surprising that his interpretive history of African Americans went unnoticed by the AHR, the profession's premier journal.

Nor was this omission simply a matter of absolute neglect. Between 1895 and 1922, the journal published ten essays about blacks and more than a half-dozen reviews written by or about African Americans.(3) While the majority of authors were white and committed to the evolving interpretation of slavery as benign and good, and Reconstruction as pernicious and ghastly, there was one notable exception. Nearly a decade and a half after the first issue, W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the country's most learned men, became the first African American to have an article published in the AHR, and the only one for nearly seventy years. More surprising, in his 1910 essay, Du Bois asserted that Reconstruction was beneficial, a claim that threatened the emergent consensus that it was uniformly a "dark cloud" in the nation's history.(4)

Du Bois unquestionably benefited from a close relationship with his Harvard adviser, Albert Bushnell Hart, who was the president of the American Historical Association in 1909 and the AHR's first secretary and treasurer. Hart maneuvered to have his star student address the Association's annual convention, and his efforts resulted in the publication of Du Bois's address as an article the next year. Yet, as Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis solemnly noted, afterward the journal and the profession ignored Du Bois's interpretation for another generation. Moreover, the profession generally marginalized black historians, including the handful who were reviewed in the journal or who appeared as reviewers.(5)

Perhaps this is why Brawley's book received so little notice outside of African-American communities. Brawley was part of a pioneering generation of black intellectuals and social scientists who applied their training to the problems of their day. Even when ignored by white colleagues, these men and women would forcefully and directly challenge the accepted. Brawley, for example, envisioned his work as a corrective to those national tales devoted to the politically and economically influential. As he wrote, "it is necessary...to study the actual life of the Negro people in itself and in connection with that of the nation."(6) During the very time that many scholars were inscribing blacks as objects rather than subjects of history, Brawley insisted that black life was well worth studying, given its inextricable link to the history of the nation. Or as he put it, "The race is not to be regarded simply as existent unto itself. The most casual glance at any such account as we have given emphasizes the importance of the Negro in the general history of the United States."(7) More than four decades passed before anyone other than African Americans followed this lead.

With the explosive growth of social history since the 1960s, more and more historians have come to share Brawley's interest in the interlaced histories of nationhood and African Americans. Today, a new perspective is taking shape, one with a clear indebtedness to Brawley and that first generation of professional historians who submitted black life to scholarly examination. It would be a mistake to call the emergent perspective a consensus; conflicting viewpoints remain a critical part of the enterprise. Still, despite the ostensible breakdown in comity and the perceived balkanization of the profession, patterns of convergence have appeared in the last quarter-century. This new perspective has three discernible features. Echoing Brawley, scholars acknowledge the central place of African Americans in the writing of the nation's history. They insist, however, that to study African Americans requires us to historicize the processes of racial formation and identity construction. Race in turn is viewed as historically contingent and relational, with full understanding of that process dependent on our abilities to see African Americans living and working in a world of overlapping diasporas (dispersed communities).

Although examples of this pattern are recent, they are part of a century of scholarship on African Americans. In its own way, the AHR played a pivotal role in shaping that scholarship. No topic figured more centrally than slavery, perhaps because no other issue seems so at odds with professed claims of liberty and justice for all. Slavery, after all, exposed a central paradox: a nation predicated on freedom nonetheless reconciled freedom and enslavement. Attention to this paradox also established African Americans as key actors in the unfolding of the nation.

Ironically, the study of slavery enslaved African-American historiography, at least in the pages of the AHR. Through 1945, scholars writing for the journal conflated slavery and blacks, viewing African Americans through the prism of the Peculiar Institution. Most of these early articles painted a picture of slavery heatedly disavowed later, but it was a portrait that the generation of scholars who lived through the Civil War or came of age during Reconstruction found quite appealing.(8) To a certain degree, the story of slavery was not just about the bygone days of a "once upon a time" era; rather, slavery occupied a prominent place in the nation's memory because it framed the building of the Jim Crow era and situated the continuing contestation of power and race.

Given that most historians found themselves in lock-step with their time, it is not surprising that most founding members of the American Historical Association and its journal held fairly conventional views about race. African Americans may have been a part of the nation's history, but they were not the movers and shakers, nor were they perceived as the architects of their own destinies. The social inferiority of blacks was a given for most white historians; it shaped their work and figured in the conclusions they reached.(9) Appropriately, the black historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Journal of Negro History and Negro History Week, author of numerous books on black life, and one among the group of black historians who challenged the prevailing perceptions of African Americans, wrote in a review of U. B. Phillips's history of slavery, "In just the same way as a writer of the history of New England in describing the fisheries of that section would have little to say about the species figuring conspicuously in that industry, so has the author treated the negro in his work."(10) Woodson's critique notwithstanding, few who published essays or reviews in the AHR presented a more rounded view of black life.

Nonetheless, historians took more note of race and African Americans than did political scientists, for example. Writing in 1985, political scientist Ernest Wilson III observed that "political science, compared to the sister disciplines of sociology and history, has failed to generate sustained interest and scholarly breakthrough in the study of black life." Wilson attributed this failure to the "methodological orientations of the discipline."(11) But as Hanes Walton, Cheryl Miller, and Joseph McCormick have countered, history and political science began in roughly the same manner--coincident with the codification of segregation.(12) Unable to divorce themselves from larger social trends and practices, scholars in both disciplines adopted different approaches to the problematic of race, approaches that are reflected in the number and distribution of articles about African Americans.

During the years 1886 to 1990, the Political Science Quarterly and the American Political Science Review published twenty-seven articles each about African Americans. Comparatively, the American Historical Review printed a total of fifty-one substantive articles about blacks--twenty-nine essays on slavery, thirteen on African Americans, and nine on race relations--between 1895 and 1994. Just as important, sixteen of the twenty-nine articles on slavery had appeared in the AHR by 1945.(13)

These figures, however, mask significant clustering. Excluding the years 1896 to 1906, the AHR published at least one article per decade on slavery through the 1940s. After 1955, the number of articles increased in frequency, averaging one article approximately every 2.67 years for the period 1955-1970. This average disguises other patterns; for instance, the journal did not print an article on slavery, race relations, or African Americans between 1959 and 1965. Three of the six essays published during the period 1955-1970 were printed in 1970. Despite this progress, we are talking about one essay in every tenth issue of the journal.

Changes within the profession produced concomitant shifts in the coverage by the AHR. Between 1979 and 1994, the journal printed an essay on African Americans roughly every third issue, or a little better than one per volume. Equally important, this representation was more evenly distributed, with no more than three years passing before the Review published an essay in the field.

Nor was this pattern limited to historical journals. Even though they published approximately half as many articles as the AHR on the subject (twenty-seven each compared to fifty-one), political science journals also demonstrated a greater interest in race and African Americans after 1960, no doubt indicative of how the demands to desegregate penetrated the academy more generally. Fully 70 percent of the essays on race-relations politics and 60 percent on African-American politics published by the American Political Science Review appeared after 1960. Meanwhile, of the essays published in the Political Science Quarterly on race relations and blacks, 50 percent of the former and 63.6 percent of the latter came after 1960.

Among historians, even as black life received more frequent comment, the context for its exploration remained remarkably consistent. Slavery continued to dominate. In part, this focus reflected the dramatic increase in slavery historiography. No chapter in American history proved as needful of closer scrutiny as the Peculiar Institution. At the same time, the emergence of a spate of new journals in the 1960s, along with the continued importance of the Journal of Negro History, provided other outlets. Ironically, therefore, at the precise moment the AHR increased its coverage, devoting more attention to the history of black life, many of the more innovative developments in African-American history occurred outside its pages.(14)

Nevertheless, given the means by which Africans first came to the Americas, the centrality of slavery is perhaps not surprising. And, on balance, the articles published in the AHR contributed mightily to new discussions in slave studies. Certainly, no single field of intellectual inquiry produced as radical a rewrite of American history as the studies on slavery produced between 1950 and 1990. As Kenneth Stampp observed in the pages of this journal, a reexamination of slavery invited a new look at the institution and the practice of historians. Surveying the literature on the enslavement of African Americans, he complained in 1952 that "the literature dealing with southern Negro slavery reveals one fundamental problem that still remains unresolved. This is the problem of the biased historian." Seeking a middle ground between U. B. Phillips and Carter G. Woodson, and attempting to demonstrate race's irrelevance, Stampp would later coin his heatedly debated phrase "Negroes are...only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less."(15) Implicitly, then, they lived as neither the childlike creatures manufactured by Phillips nor the complete designers of their own fates popularized by his few critics.

Stampp's choice phrase would eventually ignite a debate about race and identity. Ever since 1903, when Du Bois portrayed a divided soul as an alternative to either assimilation or separation, debates arose about the nature of black consciousness. Even if blacks had wanted to, Du Bois had written, they could not ignore their double consciousness. They occupied a particular place in American history, characterized by their "twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls; two thoughts; two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."(16) Yet, in his attempt to portray race as a construction--social and otherwise--and blacks as essentially the equals of whites, Stampp flattened Du Bois's poetically dense description. The twoness melded into a universal oneness, and questions of African-American identity retreated into the background. In fact, aside from his opening declaration, Stampp's pioneering account of slavery remained largely the story of a system of forced labor and exploitation.

Three years after Stampp's book appeared, Stanley E. Elkins returned us to the inner chambers of the slave's world. Interested in the work of Bruno Bettelheim in psychology, and a student of Richard Hofstadter, who a decade earlier had called for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of slavery, Elkins came to have an inordinate influence on the study of American slavery. His focus was more on arrested personality than group identity. Viewing slavery as a total institution akin to a concentration camp, Elkins advanced his now-famous Sambo thesis. Masters, according to Elkins, exerted tremendous control over their slaves. Allegedly stripped of a sustaining culture, deprived of social or psychic space, enslaved Africans supposedly internalized their subordinate status to such a degree that their behavior became infantile. His thesis sparked a historiographical debate that lasted three decades, ultimately coalescing into a discussion of racialized group identity.(17)

Few paid much attention to Elkins at first, and when scholars took note they initially accepted his contention. Elkins's argument transferred the blame for slave behavior to whites, and some found this shift compelling, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet the same social actors who at first accepted the argument began to question the role of resistance and autonomy in black life, twin themes that had a profound influence on post-1960 slave studies.(18)

Oddly, conspicuous silences emerged in the AHR. Between 1952 and 1970, the journal published just three articles on slavery. The first was Kenneth Stampp's aforementioned essay and the second a piece by Philip Detweiler on the Declaration of Independence and congressional debates over slavery. Although it would be another twenty years before the journal turned, in even the most cursory way, to the making of an African diaspora, it did print Carl Degler's comparative overview of slavery in Brazil and the United States.(19) Neither of these articles--with the possible exception of Degler's--played a substantive role in the debates roiling slavery studies by the 1970s.

By the late 1960s, historians openly rejected the Elkins thesis. in its place, a more subtle portrayal of black life appeared. Implicitly, when not explicitly, historians asked how a people could reproduce so effectively if it had internalized its subordinate status as completely as Elkins suggested. Also, even though a number of historians would come to criticize its methodology and bold assertions, many teaching African-American history were forced to acknowledge for the first time Herbert Aptheker's important 1943 description of slave revolts.(20) How odd it seemed that the same system that produced Sambo could produce Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Gabriel Prosser, and many more. The incongruities forced a reexamination.

Contrary to August Meier and Elliott Rudwick's conclusion, it is not clear that an interpretive consensus developed from this reexamination, however.(21) If anything, the colonial literature developed separately from the antebellum literature, with the latter coalescing around three approaches. Through the 1980s, most colonialists concentrated on explaining black life in distinct regions of British North America. As a result, we have pioneering studies of South Carolina, the Chesapeake region, the Middle Colonies, and New England. These historians not only avoided large macro studies, they also modified Elkins's and Stampp's concern with personality and asked instead when Africans became African Americans.(22)

In addition, colonial studies emphasized interaction between slaves and Europeans. Implicitly more than explicitly at this time, they began the discussion of African Americans in a world of overlapping diasporas--black, white, and red, initially. Taking clear note of demographic factors, staple production, spatial arrangements, and racial ideology, the literature covers several distinct zones of interaction. In South Carolina, for example, where newly arrived Africans and experienced slaves comprised the bulk of the population, a black majority developed. Whites preferred to live in the upcountry from the start, leaving Africans and their offspring a great degree of freedom. This majority introduced its own food products and horticultural approaches and created a creole language called Gullah to broker ethnic differences.

Historians who figured in the rewriting of the antebellum historiography painted their portraits of slavery on much larger canvases, favoring regional studies over local studies. One perspective, identified with cliometricians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, equated slavery with other capitalist productions. Arguing that slaves had imbibed the Protestant work ethic and were more than the empty vessels alleged in the historiography, the two fashioned a story of African-American adaptation to a system of coerced labor. Although less convinced of slavery's overall damage to blacks than was Elkins, they nonetheless described a near total institution, an analysis that prompted a fierce and protracted debate.(23)

Adopting a perspective the polar opposite of Elkins's is a group best called the "near total autonomists." This group includes among others Sterling Stuckey, George Rawick, John W. Blassingame, Leslie Howard Owens, Herbert G. Gutman, and Lawrence W. Levine.(24) Though cognizant of the brutalizing conditions of slavery, they found compelling evidence of a world beyond that created by the slave masters. From sundown to sunup, Rawick asserted, blacks carved out both psychic and social space. They laughed, sang, worshiped, made love, argued, plotted, and told stories. During these times, they forged a community and created a degree of autonomy. Careful not to exaggerate, the near total autonomists wanted to explain how a system that supposedly generated only Sambos also produced Nat Turners. The explanation pivoted on asking a series of interconnected questions about people-making, about the tools developed to do more than just survive slavery.

Mediating the economic interpretation and the cultural interpretation was Eugene Genovese's refashioning of Phillips's paternalism model. While rejecting Phillips's blatant racism, Genovese allowed for a world in which masters cared for the people they enslaved. Slavery, Genovese noted in several seminal volumes, was a class-based system of economic exploitation.(25) Masters extracted the labor of slaves for the purposes of achieving a surplus. Still, economic imperatives did not eliminate the formation of affective attachments. After all, the typical enslaved person lived on an estate with less than twenty-five bondspeople. The size of the holding dictated a kind of social and psychic intimacy. Aware of considerable variation in the lived experience, Genovese did not shrink from the attempt to synthesize the clear dialectical relationship between profit motive and human empathy. What emerged was a subtle, complex portrait of the plantation world as "cruel, unjust, exploitative" and yet a system that "bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other."(26)

In spite of the power of Genovese's prose, how do we understand the interstices of African-American life? It is the collective character of the antebellum literature that demands further attention at this point. Through 1980, few of the most visible authors asked critical questions about how the forging of an African-American identity connected with the making of an American nation.(27) Because blackness was a given, historians of the antebellum period produced detailed but one-dimensional sketches of black slaves. Too often, they were either Sambos, Nat Turners, economic actors, or active participants in a Marxian-Freudian psychodrama. No one interrogated the very idea of ideal types as developed in the four approaches.

The pre-1980 literature showed the need for a more careful exploration of the range of human genius. The juxtaposition of the four approaches reveals a people who molded themselves into being through their relationships with whites, reds, and one another. Regulated by time, spatial, and relational variables crosscut by power, the spectrum of potentiality included blacks psychologically damaged by the institution of slavery and others who constantly plotted to end its cruelty; across this spectrum, some did internalize the Protestant work ethic, and others participated in an evolving drama framed by social relations informed by paternalism.

The historical record is dotted with the names of those who lived the varied experiences. They were the Harriet Tubmans who stole themselves to freedom and in turn stole others. They were men such as the mulatto William Ellison, who purchased his own freedom and then kept others in bondage, or Robert Wright, the child of a white plantation owner and his slave concubine (who became his wife without the benefit of law). Wright both owned others of African descent and, more daringly, married a white woman in Virginia when doing so was a crime. There were those who snitched on Gabriel Prosser, the skilled Virginia bondsman who planned a conspiracy to take over Richmond and force an end to slavery, and those who served as slave drivers.(28) Remarkably, if we arbitrarily freeze the time frame, we would find that some occupied more than one position--obsequious servant, calculating sycophant, loving relative, would-be liberator. That is the story of African-American consciousness left unaddressed by the antebellum literature. What were the historical forces and factors that compelled people to make calculating yet contradictory decisions? Just as important, how do we understand their choices as contradictory?

Ira Berlin, on the cusp of this new emphasis on identity formation, anticipated the need to understand the making of African Americans. In an important 1980 essay in the AHR, he demonstrated the difficulties and importance of asking when and how an African-American society evolved.(29) From Berlin's careful synthesis of several decades of scholarship emerged a more elegant understanding of race and community. Rather than one people bound by filial ties to an African homeland, Berlin presented several peoples produced out of the vortex of history. They were Twi, Asante, Fulani, Yoruba, and Ibo; men and women caught in a system of forced labor that sustained a new economic order. In the midst of the Middle Passage, words were shared, customs exchanged, and dreams of freedom planted. There and in the Americas, these ethnic peoples became, first, African and then African American--that is, they came to see and think of themselves, in relational terms, as members of a larger collective.

During the colonial period, skin color and the circumstances of history became the determinants of slave status. Recall that well into the seventeenth century indentureship rivaled slavery as a pervasive form of coerced labor. Many of the first Africans brought to mainland British North America probably lived as indentured servants. After the 1680s, a series of laws codified the equation between race and slavery. With an increasing demand for sugar and tobacco, shifts in European labor markets, and the decline in other labor sources, slavery replaced indentured servitude. Thereafter, from Massachusetts to South Carolina, slavery defined the difference between unfreedom and freedom.(30)

Although they would be viewed as the same by those among them blinded by slavery's ubiquity, Africans in the Carolinas molded a culture and history somewhat different from the relatively small population that resided in New England. Each regional population staked its own claim to becoming African American. The ruptures of history combined with the forces of memory to create these African-American populations. For African Americans living in Middle Colonies such as New York or New England Colonies such as Connecticut, election days became critical events. On these days, African peoples held their own elections of governors or kings, mocking in the process the ways, rights, privileges, and pretensions of Europeans. Through these means, Africans came to exercise a civic right denied them otherwise. Because election-day ceremonies also drew attention to their place outside the normal affairs of the nation, this open denial of national citizenship proved to be a key rupture, exposing the social distance between most blacks and most whites. The ceremonies then functioned as an important marker of group memory-construction, as blacks reminded each other of the shared nature of their plight.

Among blacks in South Carolina, with its more regular introduction of Africans recently removed from the continent, other socio-cultural patterns developed. Free of appreciable white supervision, members of the colony's black population created a creole language. They could do so because they had a numerical superiority, and in fits and starts they dominated--for a time. That they differed from blacks in New York was certain; that they imagined membership in a world that pivoted on the racialized practice of slavery was undeniable.

Thus, although Berlin wrote of one "Afro-American Society," in actuality he described several. Since, from the start, the slave population consisted of many peoples, something had to mold those who lived in a world of overlapping diasporas into African Americans. Racial slavery became the connector, linking blacks to one another across different regional political economies, with greatly differing demographic profiles and opportunities for gaining freedom. The process was uneven, with some stubbornly refusing to accept the binary constructions that fixated on black and white. Yet because race is and was not only marked but learned, produced, and reproduced in the matrices of daily living, at certain levels of consciousness African Americans accepted what they would at other times reject. In that sense, African-American identity was forged in the crucible of slavery, as part of an interaction between the "imagined" and the "real." Without question, this identity was shaped by what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the "metalanguage" of race--that is, race's discursive ability to transfigure, transmute, and transform meaning.(31)

The powerful hold of race on the nation's history is only now finding voice in this journal. Emblematic is a recent forum, in which appeared an imaginative essay and a penetrating critique by Michael O'Malley and Nell Irvin Painter, respectively. O'Malley artfully sketched a connection between the national conversation about money (specie) and race (species) in nineteenth-century America. He concluded that many drew the analogy between the two to rationalize a structure of difference. But, as Painter insisted, slaves were in fact both property and human, specie and species. Any analysis that failed to situate this critical problematic ultimately failed to theorize the meanings of race.(32) Theorizing, however, is but the first step; connecting theory to the practice of history remains among the profession's greatest challenges.

A second generation of revisionists, while acknowledging the need to integrate approaches gleaned from other disciplines with historical analysis, has further advanced our understanding of the process of people-making. Architectural historians have reminded us of the importance of studying material culture but in its vernacular forms. Consequently, we have learned how Africans and Europeans, sharing a common physical space, openly borrowed from one another. Historians of the Atlantic working class have demonstrated the importance of looking at sites of mutuality such as the racially and ethnically integrated slave, merchant, and pirate ships that traversed the oceans and inner waterways and gave rise to an international class of workers. Others, such as Charles Joyner, have demonstrated the usefulness of anthropologic methods and folkloric techniques. But, as Robin D. G. Kelley cautioned in a response to Lawrence W. Levine, the folk must be de-essentialized, too.(33) To date, historians of slavery have done a better job of noting the reception of a cultural message than explaining the processes of knowledge and culture transmission.

Equally important, the new revisionists have asked new questions about old issues. Toward this end, Brenda Stevenson, for example, has invited us to take another look at the bold findings of Herbert G. Gutman and a generation of like-minded colleagues. Stability, she has written, was only one aspect of family life under slavery. Among the enslaved she studied in Virginia, a number had their lives torn apart by jealous mistresses, economically desperate planters, unscrupulous family trustees, or by their own commitment to realizing freedom.(34) Her approach did something else: it moved the conversation beyond the structural perspective of the 1970s and 1980s to ask what worked, when, and how well.

Or as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall emphasized in Africans in Colonial Louisiana, French and Spanish control of Louisiana combined with the highly Africanized population from mostly the Senegambian region of West Africa to make for a remarkably different slave experience. After all, slavery was disorienting; no matter where, all Africans introduced into the international system of forced labor underwent a form of social death. Nonetheless, cultural similarities, common languages and dialects, and the ability to retain African names made the slaves' Middle Passage a less devastating experience than others have asserted, for those coming to Louisiana. More important, shared traits became a bridge, uniting the African-born and creole populations. Together, they demonstrated an ability to adapt and borrow, key to the making of an Afro-Creole culture.(35)

Similarly, others writing after 1980 reminded us that men and women experienced slavery differently, and those experiences often occurred in interaction with Europeans and Indians. Indeed, the nation had crafted a tripartite image of black women as either Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire-- subservient and asexual, licentious and extraordinarily sexual, or manly and castrating, respectively--by the time of the Civil War. Black women worked as hard as black men, suffered the sting of the lash as painfully, but only the women could be molested with impunity by any man. Few slaves were ever charged with raping another slave; those who were fell into a legal void. One Mississippi judge reversed the conviction of a black man accused of raping a ten-year-old child, commenting that the state knew no such crime. Slaves were caught in that liminal status between person and property. When a Missouri woman named Celia tired of her master's rapacious behavior and murdered him, jurors in that state rejected her argument that a woman--including a black woman--had the right to protect her honor. Each of these stories, and the ones to which they are connected, opened for review the as-yet unsettled terrain of power, gender, race, and sexuality in American history.(36)

Historians of slavery were not the only ones to puzzle over the meanings of community, culture, and identity. Concurrent with the explosion in slave studies, others detailed the period of emancipation and postemancipation, as well as the period of twentieth-century community formation. Here, the AHR played a minor role in shaping the central debates. Instead, a number of important monographs appeared in economic, social, and urban history. These monographs, aided by an occasional essay, shaped most disagreements.(37)

For more than a decade, beginning in the late 1960s, many postemancipation economic and social historians tried to understand the meanings of freedom for blacks. Implicitly, when not explicitly, social historians wrestled with C. Vann Woodward's pioneering thesis in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Informed by a liberal assumption about integration into the social fabric of a nation, Woodward argued that segregation came late in the nineteenth century. With the exception of Thomas C. Holt's Black over White and Peter Rachleff's Black Labor in the South, most studies of Reconstruction turned on the story of interracial relations. An intellectually vigorous debate emerged over the timing of the introduction of the Jim Crow laws, producing provocative claims by Howard Rabinowitz, for instance, that exclusion predated segregation and that the latter was innovative.(38)

Economic historians asked an important but strategically narrower set of questions about the meanings of freedom. They sparred over the rationality of discrimination and the reasons for a sharecropping system. Each work had its own merits, but most meritorious was the larger effort to understand how African Americans made the adjustment from unfree to free laborers. Incidentally almost, the body of this work forced African Americanists to explain the tensions between the state's conservative and progressive impulses--for example, the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, the rare confiscation of white-owned land for black use, and the decision to force free people to work for their former owners in some instances.(39)

Rebecca J. Scott recently brought the AHR into the center of the discussions. In one of the few essays published since 1980 on postemancipation societies, Scott successfully outlined the boundaries of freedom in the world of cane. Her comparison of sugar production after emancipation in Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana is a careful reminder of the interaction between state policies, local practices, social position, and production. Moreover, her comparison underscores the fluid and fixed nature of identity formation, especially the politics of identity--understood as the temporally, spatially, and relationally mediated foregrounding and backgrounding of aspects of the self. In this sense, unfettered by the prerogatives of a highly racialized world, white Republicans and black voters temporarily elected officials they believed would protect their interests. Their hold on power lapsed when a coalition of planters, workers, and businessmen restored white dominion. Nonetheless, black-white voting and labor alliances provide evidence of the complexity of racial construction and the degree to which people lived in interconnected worlds demarcated by race, class, color, and other factors--a world of overlapping diasporas.(40)

Elsewhere in the profession, a historical turn prefigured the linguistic turn that was still to come. Recently, much attention has been paid to those discursive practices that shape meaning. In addition to the more nakedly obvious forms of coercive power, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and others have encouraged historians to assess the language of daily behavior. One purpose was the interrogation of the familiar; the other, a systematic appraisal of what we do not hear. On this point, Pierre Bourdieu argued, "because any language that can command attention is an 'authorized language'...the things it designates are not simply expressed but also authorized and legitimated." The result, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, was growing awareness of the need to locate the local.(41) Without benefit of such theoretical entreaties, a pioneering generation of historians advanced the importance of local or community studies. They, too, tried to locate the local, even as they attempted to follow Brawley's advice and situate their stories in a national context. Thus against the canvas of burning inner cities, historians sought to pinpoint the origins of a black ghetto.(42) Moreover, they sought to distinguish between the riotous communities of the 1960s and 1970s and the forming communities of the 1910s and 1920s.

As Joe Trotter, among others, has commented, ghetto studies relied heavily on a victimization model, the very model being rejected by slavery scholars. Yet Gilbert Osofsky, Allan H. Spear, and others felt a need to account for contemporary conditions. Spear acknowledged in Black Chicago: "By 1966, no domestic problem seemed more complex, more fraught with danger to the social fabric... than Negroes, frustrated by generations of oppression, and whites, battling what they conceived as a threat to their way of life. Chicago, with its seething ghetto ..., had come to exemplify the urban racial conflicts of the 1960s."(43) Why, Spear wanted to know, would thousands of African Americans seek a dystopian world in such numbers, if what they really sought was a promised land?

In pursuit of an answer, ghetto studies considered the process of ghetto making. They talked about "before the ghetto," the "shaping of a ghetto," or the "making of a ghetto." Informed by the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North and Midwest, ghetto studies paralleled studies of the first and second periods of intense internal migration--1900-1920 and 1940-1960. More important, ghetto studies, while concerned with race relations, detailed the creation of geographically circumscribed residentiality. Given the institutional focus of most in this genre, race became a transhistorical category, with an undifferentiated white population and an all-important black elite. Reacting to the forces of oppression; scholars paid little attention to the food people ate, the music they made, the loves they enjoyed, or the strategies they plotted.

In response to this important first step, a post-1980s group questioned the meanings of community for black urban dwellers. They adopted different conceptual approaches to explain this history, but they agreed as much as they disagreed. Eschewing the singular form, these historians spoke of an African-American community that existed in concert and conflict with many overlapping communities. Such constructions consciously challenged perspectives that defined community as a constantly forming site of potential utopia. Instead, as Elsa Barkley Brown has recently argued, community involved agreement and disagreement, with participation rather than unity of perspective being the operative frame. Because people never lived in just one community, and because those communities could easily accommodate utopian and dystopian events, people, and belief systems, uncomplicated notions of community denied the ways people actually lived their lives.(44)

Dystopia must not be confused with pathology, however. For the better part of this century, social scientists and social commentators have confused the underside of urban life and group sociologies. We have read over and over again about the pathologies that encapsulated the life chances and experiences of blacks. Even as a fourth generation of African Americanists attacked such notions in the 1970s and after, the perceptions endured. Crime, disease, and delinquencies became signatures of black life, and a full history laced with irony was replaced by stillborn images of people somehow outside of history--one-dimensional, never changing, always doomed to repeat the same day over and over again.(45)

By the 1980s, a concerted effort was under way to write African Americans into their own histories. Scholars used words such as self-determination, agency, and empowerment to name the variations of those lived experiences. But, as Thomas C. Holt cautioned, the time had passed for fanciful portrayals of truly romantic proportions. Hagiographic accounts, common during the first two generations of African-American historiography, ceased as historians shifted from a history of contribution to a history of analysis. However, implicit in Holt's warning was the reality that even the powerful histories of black self-determination had to be balanced against the limits placed on individual actions.(46) Agency has come to mean not only unbridled resistance but also slow, irregular patterns of advance and regress, each in a dialectic working toward a synthesis.

A few see in the unavoidable link between race and racism in American or African-American history an inclination to assert the primacy of race and derive monocausal explanations. Enthusiastic proponents of a social-constructionist perspective sometimes forget, however, that such argumentation has long suffused the African-American intellectual tradition.(47) It is the rare African Americanist who cannot appreciate the myriad ways in which race is constructed. They have lived in or studied communities in which the eye wars with the brain. Black communities, after all, have long included people who range in skin color from black to white. The more difficult job has been explaining the processes of people-making: How was it that the blond-haired Walter White of the NAACP was as "black" as the darker-hued actor Paul Robeson? Of course, the state played a role in prescribing who was or was not black, who could marry whom, who could be a citizen and why, and who was entitled to certain governmental protections. But notions about race and membership are implicated in an individual's understanding of community or communities.

Instead of marginalizing the role of race and racism, it is more fruitful to examine the interaction between memory, race, and community formation. As the ghetto specialists established and other scholars continue to show, de facto and de jure segregation served to limit the residential options of African Americans. In so limiting, segregation also brought together men and women of varied backgrounds and prejudices. Some have fancied this period between 1890 and 1945 the "golden age" of the ghetto. While an attractive formulation, perhaps, it is also a fantasy; there has never been a "golden age" of the ghetto.(48) First, not all urban areas developed the expansive, contiguous "ghettos" typically associated with Chicago and New York. Second, residential patterns in many southern and western cities diverged from northern and midwestern patterns. Through World War II, blacks scattered across the urban landscape in such cities; even when well-defined residential pockets emerged, they were not ghettos any more than similar concentrations of whites were. And third, throughout the period 1890-1945, residential proximity blurred significant class, color, and other differences in the black community. Nonetheless, black communities did form, and historians have to explain how and why. Typically, the explanations have turned on the notion of race as a socially manufactured reality that held people of diverse yearnings, backgrounds, and perspectives together in a web of shared aspirations.

Because we are at a conceptual crossroads, the renewed emphasis on race as a social construction should signal the beginnings of a conversation, not its end. To date, historians of African Americans have spent considerably more energy delineating the processes of racial construction than they have the complexities of identity formation. This may seem a curious claim, given the explosion of articles and monographs that manifest an interest in identity. Yet the most searching and useful essays have been about race and racial formation. Insofar as identity is considered, it is racial identity that authors discuss. But race is but one part of the self, and race is always relational.(49) Equally important, black Americans have lived in variegated communities, where class, color, religious, and other differences mattered. Therefore, how do we understand the relational matrix of identity formation? Essentially, how do we begin to understand historical actors as multipositional?

My use of multipositionality has its roots in the debate over poststructuralism and postmodernism, although my usage may be viewed as a comment on and evaluation of the typical application of the term "subject positions."(50) In thinking through the complexities of identity formation, we must consider several factors. To begin with, the study of identities includes but is not limited to the study of race, class, and gender. It is the interactive construction of identity--as child, lover, spouse, and so on--that requires fuller explication. Moreover, the self is constructed in space and time; to understand multipositionality, we need to understand how spatial and temporal factors lead historical actors to foreground or background constitutive aspects of themselves. Consider as well that relational differentials in power maximize the likelihood that certain forms of the self dominate at certain times. For instance, what a historical actor may say or do in a beauty salon may not be the same thing he or she would say or do in a church meeting, corporate setting, or confrontation with the police. If we are to take race seriously, we must begin in earnest to theorize and historicize how racial identity informs individual identity and how identity formation in turn informs racial construction--in a sense, we must take the processes of community-building seriously. Few of us, after all, acknowledge the number of selves competing for recognition at any given moment. Appropriately, human consciousness and identity formation is understood as a complex personal and social calculus in which people simultaneously add, subtract, multiply, and divide aspects of themselves in other than a predetermined manner.(51)

The tension between racial formation and identity construction is manifested in the literature, especially in those works that seek to take race and class into consideration. Some labor historians, for example, have steadfastly insisted on the importance of the point of production. Able to document important moments of interracial or bi-racial unionism, they come close to ignoring historical actors as multipositional. In such accounts, it is often simply a matter of race or class or race and class. Either way, the conceptual design assumes that aspects of individual identity are simply additive or subtractive. This way, what workers learn and experience at work can be discretely separated from what they experience and learn at home--in their households and communities. While each work makes a certain contribution, adding important detail and texture to African-American history, the point-of-production approach adds to the confusion between racial formation and identity construction, in part because it helps produce a history of black life from the outside in rather than the inside out.(52)

This is not true of all labor history, or all history of race-making and labor. Recent writings on the makings of a white working class underscore the degree to which white (like black, brown, red, and yellow) is a relational concept, formed in the mix of American social relations. As Alexander Saxton had previously noted and David Roediger jarred us into understanding, European immigrants defined themselves in relation to blacks. So, although it would be the late nineteenth century before Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge granted Irish immigrants honorary Anglo-Saxon status--meaning the status of native whites--they had begun to form an understanding of themselves as white through participation in the Draft Riots of 1863, minstrel shows, and slavery.(53) Just as important, this understanding did not occur only at work but outside of work, when "white" workers returned home to their communities and households. There, they created a sociology of relational difference predicated on whiteness that elevated them socially.

Admittedly lost in the community studies literature is an appreciation of white ethnic differences. Whites--workers, ethnics, neighbors--have a monolithic character; too frequently, they all look alike. In this regard, historical efforts to differentiate must be more fully captured. More important, African-American historians must consider the processes by which various European immigrants became white at different times.(54) The story of European immigrants "passing" for white is one of the little-explored chapters in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. history. The telling of this story has profound implications for the study and writing of African-American history.

More than anything, however, there is a need to broaden our understanding of what has been called the process of community-building. Here, greater attention must be paid to the substantive roles played by black women from slavery through the civil rights movement; they are often relegated to subordinate positions in African-American historiography. A number of pathbreaking books and essays have revealed the ways in which men and women lived together and apart. Initially posed in much the same way as Sojourner Truth's probing lament "Ar'n't I a woman," the studies of feminist scholars have consistently reminded us that all blacks were not men and all women were not white. From this critique has emerged a searching discussion of the important difference gender makes.(55)

The growth of black women's history has produced an associated development in gender history, too. From an early tendency for gender to mark the site of sexual difference, it has evolved into an analytical tool for uncovering the meanings of race and community. Literary scholar Barbara Christian has reminded us: "people of color always theorized...And I am inclined to say that our theorizing...is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language." As Elsa Barkley Brown has noted, consciousness, politics, and even theory cannot be found simply in "position papers." Using businesswoman Maggie Lena Walker as an example, she claimed, "Her theory and her action are not distinct and separable parts of some whole: they are often synonymous and it is through her actions that we clearly hear her theory." Brown insisted, moreover, that gender was part of a womanist consciousness, a perspective formed in relation to black men and to non-blacks.(56)

For those who willingly and easily disregard gender's hold on black lives and the black community, Darlene Clark Hine offered an important word of caution. Implicitly inviting us to probe the gendered lives of black men, she highlighted the power of silence. Speaking of a culture of dissemblance in which, behind the gloss of public activity, black women held inside the most private hurts, especially rape, Hine reminded us of the presence of power valences that crosscut black communities.(57) Class, color, religion, and gender amount to a partial list of the forces that situated black life in a series of overlapping diasporas and made the telling of that history at once complicated and incomplete, necessary and important.

Questions of consciousness, identity, and community will demand greater attention from African-Americanist historians, especially as scholars examine with even more care and imagination postemancipation and urbanization. It is in the nation's cities, after all, where African-descended immigrants encountered American blacks, creating in the encounter what has been called a transgeographical America. Hailing from San Juan, Havana, Vera Cruz, Sao Paulo, and Kingston, from impoverished hamlets and towns, from the rural and urban South, these children of the African diaspora became living reminders of the diversity in black life. Seldom, however, have we asked when and under what terms they became African American.

In acknowledging race's powerful hold on black life and the nation's history, we have failed to asked an intriguing and important set of interrelated questions. This disjuncture in the literature is even more curious, given the willingness to ask such questions about life during slavery. For that earlier period, we assume that Africans who were imported from the Senegambian region differed from those from Iboland or Angola, and each of these groups differed from a creole population living in the West Indies. But what of the Jamaican migrants such as Marcus Garvey and Cyril Briggs, who settled in New York? What was the process by which they and hundreds of others existed as both African American and Afro-West Indian? How do we begin to understand differences within black communities? How do we define and refine the practice of writing African peoples into a history of overlapping diasporas?

The challenge is more than theoretical; it goes to the limits of one's historical imagination. For the better part of a decade, scholars who have written about the "other" have done so in terms of stark contrasts. Few have discussed the process of "othering" so critical to community-building.(58) Some of this "othering" set recent southern migrants apart from their northern-born neighbors. At other times, sexual differences became deviances; and, though black, men and women became outcasts in their own communities. This embrace of "othering" sent men and women into groups of affiliation based on skin color, religious background, and class presumptions and pretensions. But how did it happen that the "othering," as pervasive as it was, did not destroy the bonds of community? A convenient answer is always race. But this very convenience requires us to take a closer look at what is assumed in the answer.

Consider Arthur Schomburg, the black bibliophile and curator. Schomburg's efforts to collect, collate, and preserve the records of African involvement in world affairs made him known to many. Today, he is remembered for the incomparable collection bearing his name at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Few mention that Arthur Schomburg came to the United States as Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. The child of a mother from the Virgin Islands and a father from Germany, the brown-complexioned Schomburg arrived in New York from Puerto Rico around 1891. With what Alain Locke generously called an impossible command of English, Schomburg found safe quarter and employment in New York City's multi-hued Puerto Rican and Cuban communities. As his involvement in fraternal organizations deepened, he increasingly moved into the world of black Americans.(59) Or, as Bernardo Vega commented, "He later moved up to the neighborhood where North American Blacks lived, and there he stayed. This led quite a few Puerto Ricans...to think that he was trying to deny his distant homeland...But his interest in the history of the Negro, their African origins and contributions to American society, led him to identify closely with black people."(60)

The history of how Arturo became Arthur and yet remained Arturo is the challenge for the next generation of scholars. It will require that we combine even more sophisticated conceptions of identity formation with even more imaginative historical questions and methods, that we recognize the permeability of boundaries and the multipositional nature of most human actors. Questions of politics, education, democracy, and labor will command center stage at times; so, too, will questions heretofore unimagined. And, as it has for over one hundred years, the AHR will alternate between playing a central and a peripheral role in the evolution of the resulting debates. Conceivably, such efforts will show in even greater detail and subtlety how the nation's history has pivoted on the history of African Americans.

I would like to thank Elsa Barkley Brown, Frederick Cooper, Darlene Clark Hine, Robin D. G. Kelley, Marya McQuirter, Nancy Mirabal, Joe w. Trotter, Jr., and Hanes Walton for their help and suggestions. It is beyond the scope and intention of this article to cite everyone who has played a role in shaping African-American history. I would like to apologize to anyone who nonetheless feels slighted.

1 Benjamin Brawley, A Social History of the American Negro (1921; rpt. edn., New York, 1970).

2 August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 5-7. According to Meier and Rudwick, as of 1914 only fourteen African Americans had earned doctorates in any field. Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, eds., Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (New York, 1993), 4.

3 Included were essays by some of the leading figures in early slavery historiography. For a sampling, see Wilbur H. Siebert, "Light on the Underground Railroad," AHR, 1 (April 1896): 455-63; Ulrich B. Phillips, "The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts," AHR, 11 (July 1906): 798-816; Edward S. Corwin, "The Dred Scott Decision, in the Light of Contemporary Legal Doctrines," AHR, 17 (October 1911): 52-69; N. W. Stephenson, "The Question of Arming the Slaves," AHR, 18 (January 1913): 295-303; Ulrich B. Phillips, "Slave Crime in Virginia," AHR, 20 (January 1915): 336-40; Marcus W. Jernegan, "Slavery and Conversion in the Colonies," AHR, 21 (April 1916): 504-27; Jernegan, "Slavery and the Beginnings of Industrialism in the American Colonies," AHR, 25 (January 1920): 220-40.

4 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, "Reconstruction and Its Benefits," AHR, 15 (July 1910): 781-99. Although subsequent articles would appear by African Americanists, John Hope Franklin's AHA Presidential Address marked only the second appearance of an African-American author in the AHR: "Mirror for Americans: A Century of Reconstruction History," AHR, 85 (February 1980): 1-14. Stephen B. Weeks favorably evaluated W. E. B. Du Bois's book The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in January 1896: AHR, 2 (January 1896): 555-59.

5 On how the Du Bois-Hart relationship aided in the 1910 publication, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York, 1994), 383-85; also, Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 5-6. For a discussion of Hart's early involvement with the journal, read J. Franklin Jameson, "The American Historical Review, 1895-1920," AHR, 26 (October 1920): 6.

6 Brawley, Social History of the American Negro, xxiii. For a review of the first generation of black social scientists, consult Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, chaps. 1-2; Francille R. Wilson, "The Segregated Scholars: Black Labor Historians, 1895-1950" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1988); Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991); Kenneth Robert Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African-American Intellectual (Amherst, Mass., 1993); and Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge, La., 1993).

7 Brawley, Social History of the American Negro, 373.

8 Thus an article by Wilbur Siebert on the Underground Railroad, which appeared in the first volume of the journal, and whose very subject matter challenged the efficacy of the evolving argument, offered an early and fleeting example of a divergent perspective. Siebert, "Light on the Underground Railroad," 455-63.

9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 74-78.

10 Review of American Negro Slavery, in Journal of Negro History, 4 (January 1919): 103. Even the question of capitalizing "Negro" reflected differences in stature and status. As early as 1910, Du Bois debated Jameson over this matter in his essay: see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 385.

11 Ernest J. Wilson III, "Why Political Scientists Don't Study Black Politics, But Historians and Sociologists Do," PS: Political Science and Politics, 18 (Summer 1985): 601.

12 Hanes Walton, Jr., Cheryl M. Miller, and Joseph P. McCormick II, "Race and Political Science: The Dual Traditions of Race Relations Politics and African-American Politics," in John Dryzek, James Farr, and Stephen Leonard, eds., Political Science and Its History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, forthcoming.

13 Although it would be useful to know how many essays were submitted and rejected, what follows provides a general sense of what was published. (Table omitted) Jacqueline Goggin discusses black participation in the AHA and AHR in "Countering White Racist Scholarship: Carter G. Woodson and The Journal of Negro History," Journal of Negro History, 68 (Fall 1983): 355-75.

14 A number of journals published important articles on aspects of black life, including the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Excluding the years during which it halted publication, the Journal of Negro History continued to exceed all others in terms of output and range of coverage. Equally important, the period witnessed a dramatic increase in book-length studies, many of which were important and prize winning.

15 Kenneth M. Stampp, "The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery," AHR, 57 (April 1952): 613; Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), vii. Before 1945, articles by Du Bois and one by Howard K. Beale, "On Rewriting Reconstruction History," AHR, 45 (July 1940): 807-27, portended a new direction in the study of slavery and emancipation. Du Bois's thesis that Reconstruction was beneficial and Beale's appeal that "we need studies of the Negro under Reconstruction...[not] colored by the racial prejudices of contemporaries who deemed even fundamental Negro civil rights and political activity unspeakable" awaited the arrival of a post-World War II generation of scholars who would refocus the nation's attention on what Thomas Jefferson labeled that "execrable commerce."

16 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. edn., New York, 1965), 215.

17 Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 241-47; Novick, That Noble Dream, 480-86; Richard Hofstadter, "U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend," Journal of Negro History, 29 (April 1944): 124. Ironically, Phillips had reached similar conclusions, stressing the congenital childishness of blacks and the paternalistic oversight of whites. Elkins attributed the end result to the victimizing nature of slavery.

18 Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 241-76.

19 Philip F. Detweiler, "Congressional Debate on Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, 1819-1821," AHR, 63 (April 1958): 598-616; and Carl N. Degler, "Slavery in Brazil and the United States: An Essay in Comparative History," AHR, 75 (April 1970): 1004-28. The journal did publish essays on other aspects of black life: Richard Bardolph, "The Distinguished Negro in America, 1770-1936," AHR, 60 (April 1955): 527-47; and Louis R. Harlan, "Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden," AHR, 71 (January 1966): 441-67.

20 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; rpt. edn., New York, 1987).

21 Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 274.

22 See, among other works, Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Allan Kulikoff, "A 'Prolifick' People: Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1770-1790," Southern Studies, 16 (Winter 1977): 391-428; Kulikoff, "The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700-1790," William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (April 1978): 226-59; Russell R. Menard, "The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties," William and Mary Quarterly, 32 (January 1975): 29-54; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975). Through 1980, the standard source on blacks in colonial New England remained Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (New York, 1942); for an updated interpretation, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988). Of course, influential overviews such as Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), did appear.

23 Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974). A hint of the controversy stirred by this book can be found in Herbert G. Gutman, "The World Two Cliometricians Made: A Review Essay of F + E = T/C," Journal of Negro History, 60 (January 1975): 53-227; and Paul A. David, et al., Reckoning with Slavery (New York, 1976).

24 There is always a danger of pigeonholing and erasing important differences between members--political, ideological, and personal. Suffice it to say that each author paid close attention to black autonomy, while placing different emphases on the damaging effects of slavery. Sterling Stuckey, "Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery," The Massachusetts Review, 9 (Summer 1968): 417-37; George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of a Black Community (Westport, Conn., 1972); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York, 1976); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976); and Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977).

25 Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965); The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969); and Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).

26 Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3.

27 Sterling Stuckey was an exception; his efforts culminated in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987). Later scholars would criticize his perspective as predicated on the false assumption of a biological "race": Thelma Wills Foote, "The Black Intellectual, Recent Curricular Reforms, and the Discourse of Collective Identity," Radical History Review, 56 (Spring 1993): 53-55.

28 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, "Black Women in Resistance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective," in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, Mass., 1986), 202-04; Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984); Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., "Unfixing Race: Class, Power, and Identity in an Interracial Family," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 102 (July 1994): 349-80; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); he notes that Prosser was the name of Gabriel's owner and not one Gabriel used, p. ix; and William L. Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South (New York, 1979).

29 Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in British Mainland North America," AHR, 85 (February 1980): 44-78.

30 Russell R. Menard, "From Servants to Slaves," Southern Studies, 16 (1977): 355-90; David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981); A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process; The Colonial Period (New York, 1978).

31 In this section, I use and build on points made by Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History," AHR, 100 (February 1995): 1-20; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs, 17 (Winter 1992): 251-74. A word of caution is advised, however; as Clarence E. Walker reminds us in his sometimes testy account, there is a real danger if we manufacture bold but romantic histories of black life: Walker, Deromanticizing Black History (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991).

32 Michael O'Malley, "Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in Nineteenth-Century America," AHR, 99 (April 1994): 369-95; and Nell Irvin Painter, "Thinking about the Languages of Money and Race: A Response to Michael O'Malley, 'Specie and Species,'" ibid., 396-404.

33 John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993); Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987); W. Jeffrey Bolster, "'To Feel Like a Man': Black Seamen in the Northern States," Journal of American History, 76 (March 1990): 1173-99; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984); Lawrence W. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences," AHR, 97 (December 1992): 1369-99; and Robin D. G. Kelley, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Folk,'" ibid., 1400-08.

34 Brenda Stevenson, "Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830-1860," in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900 (New York, 1991), 103-23.

35 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), esp. chaps. 6, 7, and 9.

36 For works that explicitly mention multiracial contact, see Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South (Jackson, Miss., 1993); Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974); James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985). Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985); A. Leon Higginbotham, "Race, Sex, Education, and Missouri Jurisprudence: Shelley v. Kraemer in a Historical Perspective," Washington University Law Quarterly, 67 (1989): 684-85; and Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens, Ga., 1991).

37 This is not the place to provide a bibliography. Pertinent articles include Jonathan M. Weiner, "Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955," AHR, 84 (October 1979): 970-92, and responses by Robert Higgs and Harold Woodman, 993-1001. Slavery remained the most prominent theme well into the 1990s. The exceptions were articles by Jane Landers on a free black town in Spanish Florida, which foregrounded a growing literature on the making of an African diaspora; special reflections on Malcolm X as a powerful icon by Nell Irvin Painter and Gerald Horne; Rebecca J. Scott's nuanced and comparative examination of emancipation; and Michael O'Malley's provocative discussion of the language of race and money, which Nell Painter critiqued: Jane Landers, "Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida," AHR, 95 (February 1990): 9-30; Nell Irvin Painter, "Malcolm X across the Genres," AHR, 98 (April 1993): 432-39; and Gerald Horne, "'Myth' and the Making of Malcolm X," ibid., 440-50; Rebecca J. Scott, "Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation," AHR, 99 (February 1994): 70-102; and O'Malley, "Specie and Species"; and Painter, "Thinking about the Languages of Money and Race."

38 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev. edn. (New York, 1974); Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977); Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (Philadelphia, 1984); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978); and "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow," Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988): 842-68. Important social histories of Reconstruction are discussed in Franklin, "Mirror for Americans"; Armstead Robinson, "The Difference Freedom Made: The Emancipation of Afro-Americans," in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge, La., 1986), 51-74; LaWanda Cox, "From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge, 1987), 199-253. In addition, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). Even among scholars of Reconstruction, the study of interracial relations has diminished as a focus over the last decade.

39 For a sample of this literature, see Harold Woodman, "Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South," Journal of Southern History, 43 (November 1977): 523-54; and "Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865-1900," in Boles and Nolen, Interpreting Southern History, 254-307; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977); Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (Chicago, 1980); Gerald David Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York, 1986); and Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986).

40 Scott, "Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane," 72-81.

41 Among other works, examine Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985); Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," AHR, 91 (December 1986): 1053-75; Pierre Bourdieu, "Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power," and Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 166 and 202-10, respectively.

42 Representative works include Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1966); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1967); and Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1976). For an overview of the literature, see Kenneth L. Kusmer, "The Black Urban Experience," in Hine, State of Afro-American History, 91-122; Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana, 1985), Appendix 7; and Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 1-21. Both Kusmer and Trotter updated their assessments in essays in the Journal of Urban History (May 1995).

43 Trotter, Black Milwaukee, Appendix 7; and Spear, Black Chicago, 223.

44 Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia, 1980); Trotter, Black Milwaukee; George C. Wright, Life behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985); Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900-1950 (New York, 1981); Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1987); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989); Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, Calif., 1991); Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945 (Bloomington, Ind., 1992); Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence, Kan., 1993); James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C., 1993); Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District, from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, Wash., 1994); Robin D. G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History, 80 (June 1993): 75-112; Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture, 7 (Fall 1994): 107-46. For a description of the utopian and dystopian images of black urban life, read Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore, Md., 1993). Notions of community appeared in the civil rights literature, too. See Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement," AHR, 96 (April 1991): 456-71.

45 For a very useful discussion of this literature and its implications, see Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J., 1993). For a sense of the generational changes in African-American historiography, read Meier and Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession; and John Hope Franklin, "On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History," in Hine, State of Afro-American History, 13-22.

46 Thomas C. Holt, "Whither Now and Why?" in Hine, State of Afro-American History, 4-5. In addition to several scholars mentioned in footnote 44, see the work of V. P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers (Westport, Conn., 1984).

47 See, for instance, Eric Arnesen's undifferentiated critique of studies of African-American laborers and his positioning of the unquestionably important contributions of Judith Stein and especially Barbara Fields; Arnesen, "'Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down': The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920," AHR, 99 (December 1994): 1602-07. Missing from his list are the writings of Nathan Huggins or the pioneering contributions of social scientists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke and writers such as Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen. Each recognized race as a social construction and a material reality decades ago. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), chap. 6; W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater; Voices from within the Veil (New York, 1920), 29-30; Alain LeRoy Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed. (Washington, D.C., 1992); Charles W. Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (1900; rpt. edn., Athens, Ga., 1988); and Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; New Brunswick, N.J., 1986).

48 The issue of memory and race is one of the dominant themes in a special two-volume history of African Americans in the Journal of Urban History, 21 (March and May 1995). For a critique of the "golden age" argument, see Mark J. Stern, "Poverty and Family Composition since 1940," in Katz, "Underclass" Debate, 220-53.

49 For examples, review Howard Winant and Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (London, 1986); Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992); E. San Juan, Jr., Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (London, 1992); Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., eds., Race in America: The Struggle for Equality (Madison, Wis., 1993). Here, I am in debt to Frederick Cooper, who has encouraged me to substitute relationality for identity, arguing that identities are formed relationally. Although I generally agree, it is also important to note that, once they form their identities, most actors acknowledge a constellation of influences.

50 In distinguishing between poststructualism and postmodernism, Ben Agger has argued that "poststructuralism (Derrida, the French feminists) is a theory of knowledge and language, whereas postmodernism (Foucault, Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard) is a theory of society, culture, and history." Postmodernists interrogate social relations from multiple perspectives; most reject the creation of grand narratives that attempt to explain the broad range of human condition. The reducible parts are therefore substituted for the universal. Poststructuralists, on the other hand, assert the importance of decoding the language, a language that is part of a contested terrain. The job becomes to reveal the concealed, contextualize the text; as a result, we are encouraged to embrace the universal aspects of the human condition because so much of our lives is contingent. Ben Agger, "Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism: The Sociological Relevance," Annual Review of Sociology, 17 (1991): 112. See also Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs, 13 (Spring 1988): 420-21; Nicola Gavey, "Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis," Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13 (December 1989): 459-75, esp. 464-66; and bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, 1990), chap. 2, for a small sample of approaches.

51 For an example of the use of multipositionality in historical writings, see Earl Lewis, "Invoking Concepts, Problematizing Identities: The Life of Charles N. Hunter and the Implication for the Study of Gender and Labor," Labor History, 34 (Spring-Summer 1993): 292-308.

52 While an exemplary study in many ways, Eric Arnesen's Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Polities, 1863-1923 (New York, 1991) typifies the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach. In his study, for example, color differences in New Orleans' black community had little bearing on intraracial or interracial class alliances. Yet John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago, 1973), 153-57, sketched a slightly different picture. Acknowledging the power of race to connect blacks of all hues, he also noted social differences based on color. Since blacks lived in a world of overlapping diasporas, to ignore a sizable portion of their world is to write them out of a portion of history. To his credit, Arnesen has recently commented on the need to examine black workers both in their communities and at work: "Class Matters, Race Matters," review of Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights (Urbana, Ill., 1993), in Radical History Review, 60 (Fall 1994): 230-35.

53 For an important survey of African-American labor history, see Joe William Trotter, Jr., "African-American Workers: New Directions in U.S. Labor Historiography," Labor History, 35 (Fall 1994): 495-523. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1971); and The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Polities and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1990); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993).

54 For an extended elaboration of this theme, see Earl Lewis, "Race, the State, and Social Construction," in Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York, forthcoming).

55 On the process of community-building, see Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It. For a review of important works in African-American women's history not heretofore mentioned, see Darlene Clark Hine, "Lifting the Veil, Shattering the Silences: Black Women's History in Slavery and Freedom," in Hine, State of Afro-American History, 223-49; the compendium of essays in Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Tiffany R. L. Patterson, and Lillian Williams, eds., Black Women in United States History, 16 vols. (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990); and the essays in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, Linda Reed, eds., "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women's History (Brooklyn, 1995).

56 Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, eds., The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York, 1990), 38; Elsa Barkley Brown, "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke," Signs, 14 (Spring 1989): 610-33, quote on 631.

57 Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-construction of American History (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1994), 37-48.

58 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), helps situate race as a study of difference; so too does JanMohamed and Lloyd, Nature and Context of Minority Discourse.

59 Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Curator (Detroit, Mich., 1989), 7-38.

60 Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, Juan Flores, trans. (New York, 1984), 195.

Copyright American Historical Association 1995
DESCRIPTORS: Black history; Magazines
COMPANY NAMES: American Historical Review
SPECIAL FEATURES: References

Review title: The rise and fall of the "politics of the African diaspora"

JOURNAL CODE: IMRE
DOCUMENT TYPE: Book Review-Favorable
LANGUAGE: English

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DIALOG(R)File 484:Periodical Abstracts Plustext (c) 1999 Bell & Howell. All rts. reserv. 03529933 SUPPLIER NUMBER: 98016707 (THIS IS THE FULLTEXT)
ABSTRACT: "Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957" by Penny M. Von Eschen is reviewed.

TEXT:

Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, by Penny M. Von Eschen (Cornell University Press, 1997) 259 pp. $39.95, cloth; $16.95, paper.

When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote The Dis?uniting of America, his attack on multiculturalism, a few years back, he charged that the efforts to establish an identification of African Americans with Africa were artificial. African Americans identified as Americans, not as Africans, he claimed. One of the many achievements of Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire is to demonstrate that the identification of significant sectors of the African-American activist community with Africa is no new fad of the 1990s or even the 1960s, but that it formed a strong part of the intellectual currency of the African-American press and of civil rights organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.

But Von Eschen's study of African-American concern for Africa will not provide any more comfort to Afrocentrists who portray an essentialist culture or learning style than to Eurocentrists such as Schlesinger. In the "politics of the African diaspora," as Von Eschen calls it, African American popular discourse in the 1940s linked African Americans with Africa and the Caribbean, not because there were biological blood ties but because their differing experiences of slavery and colonialism were all seen as part of the history of the expansion of Europe and the development of capitalism (4-5).

Von Eschen argues that the towering African-American figures in this movement, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Alphaeus Hunton, grounded their analyses of race in the political economy of slavery and imperialism, in a critique of "racial capitalism." The disruption of the influence of these intellectuals, however, under the assault of Cold War thinking and McCarthyite repression, facilitated the rise of analyses of "race" that were shorn of their political and economic context, and that abandoned their critical approach toward capitalism.

Von Eschen's work exemplifies the watchword among historians today to "internationalize," to demonstrate how transnational connections have shaped identities and movements. Race Against Empire shows that the development of African-American organizations and world views in the mid-twentieth century can only be explained with reference to a wider African diaspora, which some have labeled "the Black Atlantic." This movement expanded in the 1930s with the increased communication between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans, who may have studied together at Howard University, attended the same meetings in London or Moscow, or read each other's articles in black-owned newspapers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Lagos, and Johannesburg.

Von Eschen nicely elaborates the precise networks by which these anticolonial ideas developed and spread from continent to continent. The career of George Padmore, who did as much as anyone to forge these links, exemplified these transnational connections. Padmore, a Trinidadian, studied in the United States in the 1920s,joined the CPUSA, travelled widely for the Communist International in Europe and Africa, and then broke with Communism by 1933. He established the International African Service Bureau in London four years later, and wrote weekly or monthly columns, year in and year out, on African affairs and against colonialism for the most important African-American newspapers and for the NAACP's Crisis. He later emerged as a major advisor to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

Such scholars as Gerald Horne, Manning Marable, and Martin Duberman have studied the internationalist work of DuBois, Robeson, and other leaders at mid-century, and Brenda Gayle Plummer covered much the same material as Von Eschen in her book Rising Wind: Black Americans and U. S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Von Eschen adds substantially to the biographical accounts by paying as much attention to the African-American press and to mass organizations as to individuals. Von Eschen's book is more focused and better argued than Plummer's, as the former builds her case that a militant, anticolonial world view, verging on an anticapitalist analysis, was in the mainstream of African-American political life from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, which each had a national readership and an expanding circulation with the urbanization of African Americans, provided consistent coverage of strikes in the Caribbean and throughout Africa, and printed trenchant critiques of the consequences of European colonialism and of American corporate and diplomatic policies.

The Council on African Affairs, whose founder Max Yergan had been among the first African-American missionaries with the YMCA before he turned to the left, became by 1942 a major activist organization. It could turn out four thousand people to protest the jailing of Indian nationalist leaders in 1942, and nineteen thousand people in 1946 for a rally against the incipient Cold War. The NAACP, which too many leftist historians sneer at, also receives its due here. As Von Eschen writes, "liberal spokespersons such as [NAACP head] Walter White came not only to share the language of anti-imperialism with leftists such as George Padmore ... but also to share an analysis (or at least a description) of British and American exploitation of African nations" (42).

Of course, this growing nexus of individuals, newspapers, and organizations itself developed in a wider political context. The crisis of the 1930s provided the basis for a critique of "racial capitalism." But the Second World War really allowed the movement to develop a popular base in the African-American community. The alliance with the Soviet Union, the condemnation of Nazi racism and imperialism, the rhetorical commitment to the Atlantic Charter with its call for self-determination for peoples, and the weakening of European imperialism in Asia all opened up space for an anticolonial analysis, and the global war linked struggles at home and abroad. The African-American movement, Von Eschen shows, not only campaigned for civil rights at home as necessary for victory over the Axis abroad, but also for decolonization in India, Africa, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere, and warned against U.S. economic and military control in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Africa.

This movement reached its height as the war ended. A series of Pan-African conferences took place in Europe; African Americans provided material aid to strikes in Africa; mass-based campaigns pressed the newly-formed United Nations to work for decolonization; and activists called for a continuing alliance with the Soviet Union and for a global New Deal (and opposed the more imperialist conception of an "American Century" ). The Chicago Defender in May 1946, for example, roundly condemned the early postwar American confrontation with the Soviet Union in Iran, criticizing the "combination of forces driving fiercely toward the Century of American imperialism, World War III, and the virtual enslavement of the great masses of American people" (102).

The second half of Race Against Empire, however, details the fall of this internationalist, anticolonial movement, under the impact of the Cold War. With little forward movement in the UN against European imperialism, it became difficult to maintain a sustained political campaign, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s severe repression of the CAA and its leaders took its toll. The NAACP and the major African-American periodicals, Von Eschen claims, made an abrupt and "strategic" (109) decision in mid-1947 to cease their criticism of Harry Truman's Cold War policies. According to Von Eschen, their hope of keeping some political space open for domestic civil rights reforms under Truman was largely in vain.

Von Eschen argues further that a new type of international analysis became dominant in the African-American community in the 1950s, one which accepted the legitimacy of American claims to be the leader of the "Free World," adopting the ideology of a benevolent capitalism and of modernization theory. It conceived of racism not as grounded in capitalism or imperialism, but as an aberration in an otherwise just system. This new African-American political discourse, Von Eschen maintains, abandoned the diaspora consciousness of solidarity between Africans and African Americans based on a common struggle against racism and colonialism, and replaced it with a renewed paternalism toward so-called "primitive" (160) Africans. Thus, the disruption of the radical movement of the 1940s and the adoption of a Cold War ideology not only impeded decolonization in general and hindered the civil rights movement at home, but fundamentally reshaped, for the worse, the consciousness of the African-American movement. It is no wonder, then, that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who himself played an important role in the construction of 1950s mainstream American ideology, believes that African Americans had few substantive ties with Africa: the earlier movement had been effectively erased from historical memory.

Like the international movement which she describes, Von Eschen conducted her research on three continents, drawing on materials from U.S., British, and South African government archives as well as from anticolonial organizations and the African and African-American press. This research enables Von Eschen to show how Africans appreciated the solidarity work of African Americans, and how they resisted U.S. government propaganda efforts. She has unearthed such gems as a confidential 1951 State Department letter which noted, apparently without irony, that "the anticolonial feeling in certain African territories constitutes a formidable problem for the Free World because all of the Colonial Governments are aligned on the side of the Free World" (125).

But there are gaps in the research. Von Eschen hardly uses the NAACP or the Walter White papers, which limits the depth of her account of the NAACP's wartime radicalism, and forces her to rely mainly on critics of that organization in her account of its Cold War policy. Her reading of the African-American press draws too much from the Courier and the Defender, which perhaps overstates the hegemony of radical thinking of the 1940s, and may downplay the important role of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in New York City.

While Von Eschen discusses cooperation between this AfricanAmerican movement and the CIO in 1945 and 1946, she all but ignores anticolonial thinking by white Americans during the Second World War. The diaspora consciousness she describes did not develop in isolation from radical white movements and intellectuals. To give just two examples, Harry Paxton Howard, the main commentator on Asia for the Socialist Party's Call, wrote regularly in the 1940s for the NAACP's Crisis on racism and colonialism. Similarly, the wartime campaign of the SP and the Fellowship of Reconciliation against U.S. control over Puerto Rico undoubtedly helped stimulate the African-American interest in that issue which Von Eschen describes.

While Von Eschen's argument is convincing, she overstates her case. She claims that the movement from 1937 to 1947 was based on a thoroughgoing critique of U.S. and European imperialism, only to be replaced by a Cold War liberalism which accepted the premises of U.S. policy. But the earlier movement did not present itself only as a critique: especially during the war it claimed to be following the "true" U.S. policy, which it identified with the anticolonial thrust of the Atlantic Charter, the alliance with the USSR, and the need for a "global New Deal." This analysis, moreover, was hardly free of its own contradictions. When the CAA called in 1946 for the continuation of the "Big Three" wartime alliance, it was not only criticizing anti-Soviet moves but at least on some level accepting British imperialism. And from an anti-capitalist point of view, a "global New Deal" was by no means an unproblematic program.

Thus, when the later mainstream African-American movement clothed itself in a Cold War liberal perspective, perhaps it was just continuing this approach of using American rhetoric and ideals to push for its own demands. The "Double V" of the Second World War-victory over the Axis abroad and over Jim Crow at homebecame a "Double V" during the Cold War as well, as the NAACP and others argued that only by ending segregation at home could the U.S. attract support abroad against communism. The wartime argument that colonialism must end in order to motivate Asians and Africans to fight Japan and Germany also translated easily to demands for decolonization in the language of the Cold War.

Some of what Von Eschen identifies as Cold War liberalism in the African-American movement retained more of a critical edge toward the United States than she acknowledges. Walter White's continued support for Nehru in the early 1950s, even as the U.S. government attacked India's neutralism, constituted dissent from the Cold War. And the American Committee on Africa, which emerged in the 1950s as the leading liberal U.S. organization on Africa, had more connections with the older, anti-imperialist movement than Von Eschen recognizes.

Von Eschen largely sidesteps the question of how to approach the Soviet Union. Apart from a single reference to Soviet provision of arms to "brutal dictatorships" (188), she seems to view criticism of the USSR as an endorsement of U.S. Cold War policies. While she is correct to focus on the disastrous impact of the Cold War on U. S. policy toward Africa and on the African-American internationalist movement, she provides too little evaluation of the approach of radical African Americans, or their adversaries, toward the Soviets, and seems almost defensive about the issue. At the same time, Von Eschen perceptively observes that the traditional concerns and divisions on the left look different when viewed through the lens of the African diaspora. The ex-Communist Padmore worked with black Communists and Trotskyists in the 1930s in away that white leftists of different factions could not, and this unity spurred the development of a broad anti-imperialist movement in the African-American community and the larger African diaspora. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the ongoing transformation of social democracy, and the concomitant collapse of old certainties throughout the left, perhaps this aspect of Von Eschen's study will appeal most to activists and intellectuals trying to reconstruct a left in the 1990s. Certainly this story of the potential-and the obstacles-in building a solidarity movement across national boundaries retains its full relevance in today's world, even as it reveals an important chapter in the history of both African Americans and of the U.S. left.

Author Affiliation:

Robert Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at Rutgers University, working on a political biography of Pearl S. Buck.

Copyright Monthly Review 1997
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