Reference The African Diaspora is a reality and a fact. Hundreds of years ago, millions of people were forcibly removed from the African continent and flung across oceans, forced to labor and suffer the inhumanity of those who purchased, traded and used them like objects or animals. In the centuries since, the descendants of the dispersed have formed new cultures that have themselves grown to impact and shape the world — including the continent of their initial dispersion — not by conquest but by the power of their content. These cultures are connected by their place of origin, their shared and similar histories, and their constant influence and reliance on one another. The African Diaspora is also a story and a tool. And as such, how we choose to envision it narratively will have the most crucial impact on how we perceive its reality and how effective a use we make of its utility. As with so many things, the shape of Diaspora is determined largely by how we choose to see it. In the previous segment of this series, we encountered several frameworks developed by scholars of different fields and times. Some have been specific to the African Diaspora, while others have sought to define diasporas as a whole. Some begin with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and some point to a distant moment in antiquity as the point where our Diaspora began. And while some upheld the idea of the “underlying African self” classifying all members of the Diaspora as essentially the same, others emphasized difference and the spaces between us. Yet despite these differences, each of them is a story of us, a lens, lending a specific shape to how we see our Diaspora, our communities and ourselves. And like any tool, these stories must be evaluated: How well do they work? Do they help or harm? And what direction do they point us in as we follow them forward? So, as not to be overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of current diaspora models, this series will confine itself to two which have been most impactful for the African Diaspora particularly, the Triadic model of Joseph Harris’ and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. The Triadic / Harris Model Introduced by Jospeh Harris, one of two scholars credited with first coining the phrase “African Diaspora,” the Triadic model is compact but robust. In concept it mirrors, if not directly derives from, Eric Williams’ outline of the “Triangular Trade” in enslaved Africans, raw materials and finished products that ran between the three sites of Europe, Africa and the many colonies of the “New World.” Like Williams, Harris proposes an understanding of the global complex of historical and cultural interactions that make up the Diaspora as a relationship between just three significant points: The continent of Africa; those who were dispersed (and their descendants); and the lands to which they respectively went. Between these few poles, however, Harris encapsulates a myriad of relationships and historical points. Outlined in his work, The Dynamics of the Global African Diaspora, part of the larger work, The African Diaspora, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Stephen Maizlish, Harris immediately notes the tangible impact of diasporas as entities that, “develop and reinforce images and ideas about [the dispersed] and their original homelands, as well as [affecting] the economies, politics, and social dynamics of both the homeland and the host country or area.” In envisioning the history of our diaspora, Harris divides the timeline between what he terms the “historical diaspora,” made up of the voluntary as well as involuntary movements of Africans prior to the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the “modern diaspora,” which is essentially everything that came after. Though he makes the distinction specifically to call out the extent to which African movement in antiquity was volitional, he nevertheless points to slave trades in both periods (specifically the trans-Saharan trade which predates the trans-Atlantic by more than a millennium) as the primary forces that, “made the African presence essentially global.” Though the characteristics by which Harris defines the African Diaspora have already been explored in this series (see <strong>Issue</strong> 9), there remains more to be said. There are two primary, binary dialectics at work in Harris’ triad. The first, a global dialogue between what he terms “Africa,” and “its diaspora,” and the second, between “homeland” and “hostland,” played out in the communities and individual minds of the dispersed. <strong>No</strong>t unexpectedly the two exert strong influence upon one another, as for Harris, it is the “gradual transformation from African to African American or African European [that] helps to explain the complexity and dialectical contradictions in the relations between the African diaspora and the homeland, the phenomenon behind W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of ‘double consciousness.’” Whether this is a wholly accurate depiction of DuBois’ double consciousness or whether that concept constitutes a final word in the process of African American identity-building, Harris continues to explore these dialectical contradictions comparing the homeland/hostland dichotomy which he situates at the root of every diaspora consciousness to what he deems the more unified, arguably less affected self-image of the “African.” “When the colonial era ended,” he argues, “after less than a century in most cases, the colonial identity had not fully matured. Consequently, until the 1960s, most Africans in Africa retained a primary ethnic allegiance, while their descendants abroad constituted a ‘stateless’ diaspora without a common country of origin, language, religion or culture.” The fact that, for Harris, the transition from African to African American — or any other iteration of Diaspora-identi- 96 aphrochic
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