The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. (Book Reviews).

The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Edited by Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxviii, 566. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-253-21494-7; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-253-33425-X.)

Indiana University Press can be counted on for collections concerning the state of the field in African diaspora scholarship. A good deal of work has filled the years since IUP gave us Africanisms in American Culture (Joseph E. Holloway, ed.; Bloomington, 1990), and now the press has rolled out, simultaneously, two large collections dedicated to research on Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic world (each book almost twice as large as Africanisms). Together, these volumes tell us a great deal about how the field has changed over the last ten years. They also suggest where scholarship on black dislocation and settlement might be headed in the decade to come.

For the most part, the essays in both volumes originated as papers at two academic conferences convened in the mid-1990s: "Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora," hosted by the Comparative Black History Ph.D. program at Michigan State University, and "The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Self-fashioning," held at State University of New York, Binghamton. As the titles of the conferences suggest, each volume at least alludes to a classic debate in Afro-American studies concerning the relative importance of origins versus destinations in determining the nature of black society and culture. Beyond this, the volumes also reflect an admirable self-consciousness as far as the nature of their subject matter is concerned. Thus, at points, each seeks to come to terms with the African diaspora as a concept, lest it become, as Thomas Holt writes in Crossing Boundaries, "just another academic buzz-word" (p. 34).

Crossing Boundaries consists of eighteen essays organized under four headings: "Comparative Diaspora Historiography"; "Identity and Culture"; "Domination and Resistance"; and "Geo-Social History and the Atlantic World." In The African Diaspora, there are thirty-three essays each arranged under one of five headings: "The Diaspora: Orientations and Determinations"; "Addressing the Constraints"; "Race, Gender, and Image"; "Creativity, Spirituality, and Identity"; and "Reconnecting with Africa." Thematically, then, the essays in each volume attend to many of the same issues. The African Diaspora, however, is more wide-ranging in its treatment, containing as it does essays representing a greater variety of disciplines (among them, art history, history, sociology, political science, literature, music, and the health sciences). With one exception, the contributors to Crossing Boundaries are all historians.

In The African Diaspora the durable Herskovits-Frazier debate is carried on but transformed into a spirited conversation between scholars favoring "Afrocentrist" lines of inquiry for the study of diaspora society and culture and those convinced that an "Atlanticist" approach is more revealing. Along these lines, Michael J. C. Echeruo's "An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project" offers compelling advice to those engaged in research on the creation and transformation of black identity in the modern world. It is an easy thing, argues Echeruo, to overstate the historical malleability of any particular human identity. Nkiru Nzegwu's essay on the "The Concept of Modernity in Contemporary African Art" is a marvelous example of how paying close attention to African contexts can help us make sense out of such stock terms as modernity. Sally Price's contribution on the textiles and calabashes manufactured by Saramaka women (Suriname) is a virtuoso piece of scholarship that builds to the conclusion that ambitious Afro-American artistic criticism must move beyond a fascination with "intercontinental continuities" and "devote serious attention to some of the humbler dimensions of artistic expression, such as the steps by which a work is made and the social context in which it's embedded" (p. 222). In her essay, Sandra L. Richards explicates the changing social context of the Jamaican theatrical practice of Jonkonnu to very good effect. Other essays demonstrate an admirable synthesis between the two major research directions represented by Afrocentrism and Atlanticism. Among them are Joseph E. Inikori's very interesting rekindling of the debate over the nature of unfree labor in pre-colonial Africa and Laura J. Pires-Hester's work on the development and articulation of Cape Verdean ethnicity.

What is true of Inikori's and Pires-Hester's work is true of nearly all the pieces in Crossing Boundaries. In these essays, the Herskovits-Frazier debate is evident, for the most part, only in how the contributors synthesize or transcend it. A lesson made abundantly clear in these essays is that African diaspora scholarship requires of its practitioners considerable conceptual breadth, methodological flexibility, and a fine sensitivity to change over time. This is a point that Earl Lewis and Thomas C. Holt drive home in the volume's first two essays, with Lewis concentrating on how a diaspora framework throws light onto various intricacies of Afro-American social history and Holt proposing how the concept informs a very profitable kind of world history. Kim D. Butler's work on the politics of black identity in postabolition Sao Paulo and Philip A. Howard's contribution on the political culture of Afro-Cubans in the late nineteenth century are particularly good examples of the kind of work for which Lewis calls. Lisa E. Davenport's essay on "Jazz and the Cold War," Edward L. Cox's comparative piece on emancipation in Grenada and St. Vincent, Carlos Aguirre's paper on enslaved people's use of the courts in Peru, and Allison Blakeley's work on European contributions to the development of our present racial vocabulary all illustrate the kind of global history that Holt has in mind. Jack P. Greene's very impressive essay should be read by anyone contemplating an Atlantic component for their research or teaching. Michael P. Johnson's "Out of Egypt: The Migration of Former Slaves to the Midwest during the 1860s in Comparative Perspective" reminds us that for blacks in the United States, intracontinental diasporas were as significant as transatlantic ones. Frederick Cooper closes Crossing Boundaries with an essay that brings to mind a most promising direction for new work in the field: research that brings Africanist perspectives and what is known about internal African diasporas to bear on that continent's more far-flung outposts.

ALEXANDER X. BYRD
Rice University