Paper Presented Arthur Dion Hanna Jr. to the 43rd Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, St Hughes College, Oxford University: 8-10 January 2014
ABSTRACT
It has been indicated that
cultural resistance is an essential element in the historical effort to create
a world which satisfies the “needs and powers of men”, with its goal being
“emancipation from slavery” (Horkheimer 1972). In this respect, this paper explores
the seminal cultural resistance, which, although inherent in eighteenth century
literature, festivals and folk tales emanating from the African Diaspora, has
flowed with concomitant currents of ambivalence of identity and an often
embarrassing enmeshment with Western philosophical traditions, which veil the
vital Pan African essence of early African Diasporan literary, artistic and
cultural endeavours (Henry 2000; Hanna 2011).
The eighteenth century was an era driven by the enslavement of African people
and colonial expansion by European imperial powers. The culture shock of
physical bondage and the often brutal harsh regimented conditions of
enslavement created a universe in which resistance took a variety of forms,
many of which were veiled in the limited creative space afforded by slave
masters and Western academia.
The dehumanizing experience of enslavement during this era was also
characterized by slave societies in which enslaved Africans were forbidden to
speak their own languages or to openly worship their ancient deities. This
oppressed and restricted reality also ensured an ambivalence of identity and a
fractured sense of 'being'. It is within this contradictory contextual frame of
reference that we explore the techniques of cultural resistance and the
struggle for emancipation, which laid the foundations of Pan African identity.
The apparent paradox and ambivalence of eighteenth century African Diasporan
resistance cloaked in Western philosophical discourse confirms the conclusion
that either culture itself or the regimes of power that are “imbricated in
cultural logics and experiences” can ever be wholly consistent or totally
determining (Dirks et. al. 1994:18). In this regard, it is asserted that
identities may be seen as variably successful attempts to create and maintain
coherence out of “inconsistent cultural stuff” and “inconsistent life
experience” but that every actor always carries around enough disparate and
ontradictory strands of knowledge and passion so as always to be in a potentially
critical position (ibid.).
In this paper we critically examine the phenomenon of ambivalent and fractured
identities which, paradoxically, provided a foundation for the African
Diaspora's creation and maintenance of a coherent identity linked to their
African roots in the eighteenth century which ultimately incubated and gave
birth to the modern Pan African movement. Of necessity, we engage parallel
streams of race, class and gender which flowed inextricably throughout the
eighteenth century and were crucial in the revolutionary process of Pan African
identity formation.
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1 In this paper the term “Pan African” has two meanings. In the first
instance, it refers to the collective resistance of Black populations from the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe against Western slavery, imperialism, colonization
and racism from the 1770's to the present time (Stuckey 1987; 1994; M'Baye
2011:9). The second meaning is the diffusion of African survivals (known as
Africanisms) in different parts of the world, such as the spread of African
cultural values, customs and ideologies into the Black Diaspora since slavery
(Levin 2003; M'Baye 2011:9).
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Salaam in
Afrikadesta
In the context of the colonial and slave realities of Africans at home and
abroad during the era of the 18th century, it is fortuitous that we are having
this discourse in the ancient precincts of Oxford University, given that one of
its famous alumni was one William Penn2, who converted to Puritanism from
mainstream Church of England religious doctrine and to whom a grant of letters
patent was made of extensive North American colonies, including Pennsylvania,
the so called Quaker State (Garranty and Carnes (eds.) 1999; Osgood 2010) some
30 years after a proprietary grant had been made to then Attorney General, Sir
Robert Heath, of the Carolinas, which included the Bahamas Islands, the archipelago
where Cristobal Colon, aka Christopher Columbus is reputed to have first made
landfall in his momentous so called voyage of discovery which set into motion
the historical train of colonial events punctuated by the kidnappings and
forced enslavements of millions of Africans and which helped to create the
underlying cultural, economic, social and political fabric of the 18th
century (Craton 1983; Craton and Saunders 1992; Hanna 2011).
Stuart Hall asserts that the post-colonial experience prepared the colonized to
live in a postmodern Diasporan relationship to identity and that,
paradigmatically, it is a diasporic" experience (Hall 1996:490). In this
frame of reference, cultural research agendas must have at their epicenter an
awareness of the lived Diasporic experience of ordinary, everyday people and of
the complex and multifaceted interaction of race and other social phenomena and
consequent hybridization, which often conceals the inner dynamics of social
interaction utilized in myth creation (Hanna 2011:218). In this regard, Avtar
Brah argues that experience is best understood as the mediated process of
making sense of the world symbolically and narratively (Brah 2007).
In explaining the complex matrix of symbols surrounding the concept of identity
in an African Diasporic context, it is critical and essential to consider the
contention that, from the Afro-Caribbean perspective, philosophy is an
inter-textually embedded discursive practice and not an isolated or absolutely
autonomous one (Henry 2000:2; Hanna 2011:218). Henry asserts that the formation
and current structures reflect imperial history of the cultural system which
was housed in the larger discursive field of Caribbean
society (Henry 2000:3). He further points out that the history of discursive
violence in the Caribbean has produced high levels of mutual de-centering and
inter-culturation between the African and European worlds, the European and
Indian worlds and the Indian and African worlds and that this violence has left
parts of these systems fairly intact, other parts highly mixed and others that
are damaged beyond repair, which is the heritage upon which creative
totalizations must build, with these imploded foundations having led to
superficial comparisons with post-modern thought that can be misleading (Henry
2000:15).
In this context, it is important to bear in mind Paget Henry's indication that
the impact of colonization had at least three important consequences for Pan
African discourse, with the
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2 University
of Oxford
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first being the devaluation and negation of the "truth claims" of
Europeans and European educated Africans, on assumptions of White superiority.
Secondly, their hybridization, as they absorbed European contents and adopted
European languages, as a medium of expression and thirdly, in addition to
Arabic languages, African discourses, which were primarily oral, developed
writing capabilities in European languages (Henry 2000:44). The Eurocentric
educational mindset has created contradictions and ambiguities in Caribbean Pan
African scholarship, with Western historicism being one of the most important
generative ontological constructs of modern Caribbean thought (Henry 2000:48).
Paget Henry concludes that, from early African literary efforts of the 18th
century, the writings of the African elite, such as Ottobah Cugoano, Anton Amo,
Olaudah Equiano, Africanus Horton, Bishop Crowther, James Johnson, Edward
Blyden, Kitoy Ajasu and Joseph Casley-Crawford, have all been exposed to
European education and absorbed many of its biases, with it only being in the
post-colonial period that these "clouds of invisibility" have begun
to disperse, allowing traditional African philosophy to emerge (Henry 2000:44).
Henry declares that contradictory ambivalences result from the hybrid nature of
colonial languages and other signifying systems and that the persistence of
Euro-centric values and meanings in the thinking of Pan African philosophers
reflect "embarrassing traces" that limit the effectiveness of their
critiques (ibid.).
In this Pan African mindset, Henry contends that the traditional, pre-modern,
African, with his national Yoruba, Baluba, Akan, Igbo and other African
traditional concepts of self and identity are subsumed in the idea of "the
negro" and placed at the base of European conceptualization of humanity,
inherently inferior and essential to the formation of European and Western
identities (Henry 2000:55). In this respect, in seeking the inner core of
traditional Africa, it is imperative that we deconstruct the Western fiction
and begin to see the essence of identity and "being", as well as
creative activities of African deities (Henry 2000:55; Hanna 2011:222). Wole
Soyinka's analysis of this pre-modern, traditional African paradigm
demonstrates that most African ontologies are premised on four basic stages or
areas of existence, namely the world of the ancestors, the living, the unborn
and the "creative womb or matrix of original forms and energies"
(Wole Soyinka 1990:140-160).
In this frame of reference, Fashina has asserted the need for the carving of a
distinct critical canon for the reading of Black/African literature (Fashina
2008:60). He points out that African names of humans, flora, fauna and objects
as used in African literary and cultural discourses are ritualistic and
historical, carrying the same sacred meanings (ibid.). This consciousness of
the imperative of creating a code for African cultural interpretation was the
foundation for the first International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in
Paris in 1956, with intrinsic exploration of the Crisis in Negro Culture
(Fashina 2008:61). Nelson Fashina points out that subsequent conferences and
congresses3 of African American writers and critics have examined the negative
impact of writing or book culture (literary theory and interpretation)
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3 C/f Fashina's critique of Copans' 1999 IFRA Lecture which questioned the
authenticity of African Studies (Cited in Fashina 2008).
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on the drive for a Black
critical aesthetics (Fashina 1997:11; 2008:61)4.
It has been indicated that several cultural genetic factors foreground this
sense of nationalism and Pan Africanist consciousness, primarily the need to
create a theory of Africanism and Blackness which is “distilled from the
homogeneous pattern of emotive and mythical interpretations” of values in
contrast to the “European induced images and conceptions of our universe”,
which is an organic aspect of African imagination and the symbiotic aspect of
African collective consciousness (Irele 1990:54; Fashina 1994:73; 2008:61).
Fashina argues that, quite against this strive for “African nationalist
consciousness in culture and literary studies is the “European standard
interpretation” of African studies as more a “mental construct” rather than a
“researchable quality” (Fashina 2008:61). Fashina declares one needs to remind
the proponents of this “absence theory of Africa
and African epistemology” that criticism theory and dialogical reasoning and
philosophy are not alien to African culture and traditions. He points out that
the pages of history are replete with records that court historians and poets
did exist in the palaces of African monarchs, kings and emperors of the early
African empires before the invasion of the continent by Western colonial
imperial forces in the 18th century.
These historians and poets were court officials and although not invested with
official designation by university tradition as research fellows and scholars,
they nevertheless performed such roles and functions in their relative
conditions, age and time as researchers in history, ethnography and culture,
becoming ultimately the unacknowledged sociologists and anthropologists of the
African spatial dimensions of their time and the “pedigree” of their records
and informal archives have formed part of the “data sites” collected by early European
historiographers, ethnographers and social researchers, whose works form the “templates
for today's modern interpretations”. This provides fertile ground for the
assertion that, regardless of whether the European social science establishment
was the “biological parent or midwife” that took delivery of the now “orphaned
African studies”, the fact remains undeniable that there had been a form of
informal study about Africa and its culture, even though in “unsophisticated
scale”, before the “invention of the now canonized term African Studies”
(Fashina 2008:61)5.
In this respect, it is essential to consider that the homogenization of African
cultures is detrimental because it “overlooks the multifarious African
civilizations” from which specific African Diasporan writers came or evolved
(M'Baye 2011:6-7). As asserted by Colin Palmer, we need to emphasize the
difference between African cultures by recognizing that these people who
resided on the African continent defined themselves solely in accordance with their
ethnic groups (Campbell 2000:56-59). This underscores the specification and importance
of social relational and cultural perspectives in understanding the basic
conditions under which the migration of enslaved Africans occurred (Mintz and
Price 1976).
In this contextual framework, in which African names and objects are
interpreted in their
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4 C/f Diop 1974; Gates 1984; Henry 2000; Hanna 2011
5 C/f Diop 1974; Achebe 1988
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sacred contexts, their implications and transformations from one space to
another and their semantic, semiotic and cultural configurations can only be
understood fully by the sharers or stakeholders in the culture (Abram 1997:14;
Fashina 2008:69). This engages a necessity to “re-inscribe” the continent of
Africa into the history of the Black Diaspora and requires writing Africa into the global history of Pan African resistance
and tracing this history to early literature and cultures of the Black
Diaspora. This helps us to see and acknowledge the subtle tactics that enslaved
Africans invented from the belly of the slave ships of the Middle Passage in
order to resist European oppression and reconnect with Africa6 (M'Baye 2011:6).
M'Baye emphasizes the need to examine the conditions early Black writers experienced
during the middle passage or after their arrival in the New
World and to explore the specific cultural contexts and social
relationships that influenced their works and lives during the 18th century. He indicates that this approach to literature
consists of letting the texts talk in order to reveal the rich syncretism of
African and European cultural elements that permeate them.
This de-homogizination of Africa helps us to examine the exact African
societies whose folklore, myths, religions and world views permeate early Black
Diasporan writings (M'Baye 2011:7). M'Baye concludes that, by exploring these
specific African retentions, one can see how the pioneers of Black Atlantic
literature blended their African identities with their Western traditions to
achieve admissibility and social and economic status in a new world in which Europeans
had equated the adjective African with inferiority and inhumanity. Hence, the Black
Atlantic literature should be interpreted through an African centered method that
validates the importance of these multiple identities, positions and ideas that
early Black writers developed in particular moments of their lives to
strengthen or weaken their Pan African consciousness (ibid.).
This begins with an acknowledgment of the distinct African cultures from which
the authors came and a validation that the contributions of the first Black
women writers made in the development of Pan Africanism (ibid.). Amy Levin
emphasizes the need to combine methods of cultural anthropology, literary
criticism and intellectual history, which serve as metaphors of cultural and
social resistance of women in the Black Diaspora (Levin 2003).
However, Paul Gilroy has advanced the term Black Atlantic to describe what he
views as the “ambivalent representation of race and nationalism” in the
writings of early American and British writers and intellectuals. In this
respect, he theorizes Africa in terms of dualities to reveal the diversity of
modern Black cultures (Gilroy
1993). However, M'Baye points out that, although it broadens our understanding
of relations between Africa and the Diaspora, Gilroy's
theory is open to serious critique because it over emphasizes the
anti-essentialism, hybridity, individuality and ambivalence of early Black
writers of the Diaspora towards Africa. In
this regard, Gilroy's vision of Black cultures
as fragmented overlooks the complex ways in which Black writers of the Diaspora
have consistently perceived Africa in Pan Africanist terms despite their
fluctuating relations towards Africa. This
rigid theory of hybridity excludes Africa from
the experiences of Black people in the Diaspora (M'Baye 2011:11).
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6 “Pan African resistance began in the belly of the whale from which the
sons and daughters of Africa were dispersed all over the New
World, occupying every conceivable task” (Gomez 2005). C/f Gomez
1998
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Gilroy has
contended that the works of Wheatley and Equiano should be valued only as a means
to observe the durability of African elements in the Diaspora or dismissed as
an inadequate mixture, doomed always to be something less than the supposed
pure entities that first contributed to produce it. Their legacy is most
valuable as a mix or hybrid, with its recombinant form being indebted to its
present cultures but remaining “assertively and insubordinately a bastard”
(Gilroy 2000). Gilroy
also argues that neither Equiano nor Wheatley ever returned to the African
homelands from which their long journey through slavery had begun and that
Wheatley's poetry reflects her personal transformation from African to American
(ibid.).
M'Baye points out that, by representing Equiano's and Wheatley's relations to
Africa as an irreversible disconnection from the continent and total conversion
into American cultures, Gilroy's theory of hybridity assumes that this process
of cultural and social mixing occurs only in the Black Diaspora, as if the
African continent from which the enslaved Black people came was and continues
to be a single homogenous and pure entity (M'Baye 2011: 11). Gilroy neglects how these writers bridged
their physical distance from their homeland and attenuated their self
alteration through frequent appropriation of African identities (ibid.).
This process of self navigation reveals the spiritual significance of Africa for 18th century Black Americans such as Wheatley
and Equiano (Baker 1980). This constant attachment or spiritual journey to Africa produces a “double nomenclature” or the act of
being caught between two worlds7 (ibid.). In this self navigation, on the one
hand, they were not free to be Africans, finding that their traditional rituals
and the instruments necessary for their performance suppressed by White
society. On the other hand, they were defined by law as outsiders and were
excluded from the free, human, community that the Puritans designated as the
City of God in the New
World (Baker 1980; M'Baye 2011:12-13). In mapping this self
navigation, the transportation of African oral narratives permits us to make
inter-textual and comparative analysis between these tales and the narratives
of African American slaves8 (M'Baye 2011: 12-13).
In this respect, it is essential to consider that engaging 18th century African
scholarship in the context of modern Pan African political theory poses
problematic enigmas, which must be placed under the microscope of subtext
analysis (M'Baye 2009). As indicated by Anthony Bogues, early Black slave
narratives reflect discursive practices of slave criticism and critique that
produced alternative meanings of racial slavery, natural liberty and natural
rights and countered the dominant 18th century ideas of racial plantation
slavery. He points out that, as documents of slave political criticism and
critique, the narratives have a great deal to tell us about 18th century social
and political ideas and form a central part of an Africana radical intellectual
political tradition (Bogues 2003).9
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7 C/f DuBois 1903
8 C/f Herkovits 1936; 1941
9 C/f Piersen 1993; Berlin 2003
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In this context, Babacar M'Baye profoundly asserts that 18th century Black
Diasporan writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Quobna Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano
were pioneer writers of the Black Diaspora who identified with Africa and
developed sustained criticism against slavery, racism and other forms of
oppression against Black people in the New World and Africa.
In their works, they made strong Pan Africanist and other nationalist
references that allowed them to offset the occasional ambivalence that they
expressed towards Africa. The Black Diasporan
writers were part of a small elite group of Western educated Black
intellectuals whose views on Africa did not
represent those of all other Black populations in the West (M'Baye 2009). As
indicated by M'Baye, they received education and eventually acquired freedom,
experiences and opportunities which were not available to Black people in the United States and the Caribbean.
Yet they utilized their elite status and individuality by attacking Western
slavery and linking their suffering to that of Black people in Africa and in the African Diaspora, thereby becoming
"pioneers of Pan Africanism". Recognizing this subversive quality of
Black Diasporan authors requires us to interpret their writings of Pan African
and radical texts that grappled with the racial, ideological and political
realities of Western slavery and imperialism on the Black world (M'Baye
2011:3).
As Chapman advises, the slaves created a rich oral literature in their new
tongue and a distinct culture to sustain themselves intellectually and
spiritually and gave expression to the “man in the slave” in opposition to the
dehumanizing conditions of slavery. Slaves could gather together only for
religious worship and beyond the expression of strictly controlled permissible
religious sentiments, spirituals provided the imagery and a veiled structure
for the utterance of hidden uncontrollable freedom aspirations. The legal
status of slaves was as property but unlike other stolen property, slaves
refused to remain stolen (Chapman 1971:xiv). Similarly, M'Baye indicates that,
by comparing Black Diasporan narratives, one can identify trickster figures and
resistance traditions that are similar to those that permeated the cultures of
both enslaved and free Black Diasporan people. Such comparison of Black
Atlantic narratives reveal the relationship between the history of the Black
Diaspora and Africa (M'Baye 2011:16). In this
regard, a strong influence of African cultures and Pan Africanist spirit of
resistance can be identified in the writings of Wheatley, Cugoano and Equiano
and their inter-weaving of history and literary analysis tends to demonstrate
the Pan African dimensions of their works (M'Baye 2011:19).
More critically, it has been asserted that the concept of African Womanism
urges critics to study the experiences of Black women, living within European
societies, within African paradigms (Dove 1998:515). This African centered
feminism emphasizes the boundaries confronting Black women who resist race,
class and gender based oppressions (Davies and Fido 1990; John 2001; Hoving
2003). In this respect, M'Baye indicates that, in her poetry, Wheatley
developed her own form of Black Womanism by using the verbal skills of Black Griottes
and traditional African tricksters such as Ananci, who could assume either the
form of a spider or alternative male or female human forms, in order to
negotiate her freedom within an 18th century New England culture in which
Puratinism and Methodism were predominant10
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10 Griotte is the feminine equivalent of the term Griot, which is a term for
traditional African historian, lyricist, story teller, diviner, adviser and
healer (M'Baye 2011:24). C/f Hale 1998
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(M'Baye 2011:24). M'Baye suggests that identifying Wheatley as a Griotte
suggests the major role that this pioneer Black writer from Senegal had on Pan
African Literature that praised Puritan and Methodist Christianity and American
patriotism in order to achieve freedom for enslaved Africans, confirming
Robinson's optimistic statement that exhaustive research will one day reveal
Phillis Wheatley as a cleverly disguised, badly misunderstood, militantly
assertive Black woman (Robinson 1975:30; M'Baye 2011:24).
Abraham Chapman declares, the slave narratives created a new image in American
literature: the slave as hero. Some of
the reactions to the publication of the slave narratives reflect the first
conscious awareness of this new type of hero in American literature (Chapman 1971:xviii).
Similarly, Dean has asserted that slave songs and poems, music, stories and religion
played a significant role in slave culture, with it being through these modes
of expression that slaves were able to imprint their existence, leaving
symbolic representations of their African history in the New
World (Dean 1995:11). The embodiment of African musical traditions
into Bahamian cultures symbolized the strength of Black slaves to preserve
their heritage and identity in West African culture (Bethel 1991).
We are reminded by Grace Turner that displaced Africans could draw on cultural
references to create appropriate personal perceptions for themselves as well as
their children. This would allow an alternate reference point for understanding
their values as individuals, regardless of their legal and social
circumstances. Enslaved Africans, living under difficult daily conditions, were
thus assured the promise of a better after life (Turner 2007:30). In our analysis
of 18th century Black Diasporan literature, we must, of necessity,
adopt these alternate reference points and terms of analysis which offer
fidelity to these realities and this demands a radical reassessment of the
Black Diasporan literature of the 18th century through the lens of African context
and contemporary social historical realities. This contextual framework leads
to inescapable links between these Black writers and the seminal and
foundational dimensions of Pan African thought and scholarship and provides new
insight into this significant body of 18th century literature and scholarship
and into modern Pan African theory.
As poignantly asserted by Peter Abrahams, if the men inaugurating the new ways
have the sense and the patience to preserve the finer qualities of the old ways
and fuse these with the new, then we can expect something magnificently new
from Africa (Abrahams 1960:75). This confirms
Tom M'Boya's declaration that the African desires to be understood from the viewpoint
of his or her own people. Africa must now
assert its own personality and speak for itself (M'Boya 1960:30).
Free the Land!
A Luta Continua!
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