though voluntary or nonprofit sector activity has not traditionally been a focus for either Africanist or African Americanist anthropological study. Starting with the formation of African American churches and mutual aid societies in seventeenth century America through the 1960s civil rights and contemporary nongovernmental organizations like TransAfrica Forum, the African diasporan nonprofit sector has been a critical, albeit little studied, forum for people of African descent in the Americas to create new identities and, in some cases, transnational ones. Much of African American cultural production occurs in this independent or third sector as it is sometimes called in the literature. Many of these grassroots initiatives became bases for political action, the historical role of the African American church as well as various pan-African movements being among the most poignant examples.
The African diasporan nonprofit sector, from colonial times in the United States to the present, has much to teach us about how locality, that is, a sense of place or community, and identity are created in conditions of globalization. Afrocentricity is just one of several sometimes conflicting ideologies (for example, variants of pan-Africanism and African diaspora approaches) that have emerged, largely through the collaboration of academics and grassroots activists, to reconcile African Americans’ relationship to Africa—what W. E. B. Du Bois so aptly called the persistent “double-consciousness” of “black folks” in the Americas (see Du Bois 1903/1990).5
Pan-Africanist scholars as early as Du Bois (e.g., 1939, 1990) attempted to define the diaspora as a model for African and African American cultural dynamics. These earlier conceptions of the African diaspora conceived of it as the cultural aggregate of individuals of African descent; the term was used to refer to persons of African descent living outside the African continent as a result of transatlantic slavery and resulting international oppression and racial terror (Padmore 1956; Drake 1982). For various reasons, despite the longstanding scholarly study of African peoples in the Americas as part of a transnational diaspora, a critical discourse on this model only recently became part of the anthropological mainstream (Appiah 1992; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994; Harrison and Harrison 1998; Holtzman and Foner 1999).
In this study, the term “African diaspora” does not refer to any one of the particular current models (e.g., Appiah 1992; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1994; Harrison and Harrison 1998). Following Sanchez (1997:61), the term “African diasporan identity” as used in this study applies to a group of people linked by their collective social memory of common historical experiences (for example, slavery, racial terror, migration) as well as some aspects of common African ancestry, whether “imagined,” acknowledged, or denied. Instead of presuming that African diasporan identity is necessarily rooted in geography, “race,” or a predetermined notion of culture, this study presents its composition and dynamics as a research problem to be studied.
Even though the scale and intensity of global cultural interchange has accelerated in the contemporary period for America’s African diaspora, these processes are centuries old and begin with the transatlantic slave trade. There are several reasons that despite the prevalence of African diasporan identity formation projects and initiatives in North America’s nonprofit sector, they, and African American cultural production more generally, have until recently received little attention from the discipline of anthropology.
Generally, the complexity of African diasporan cultural dynamics in the New World relegated African American anthropology to a minor role in the discipline. Conventional, place-based notions of culture do not accommodate the complexity of the African American cultural experience.6 Anthropology’s primary focus, in the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, on smaller-scale societies diverted attention from more heterogeneous communities or intercontinental cultural processes. In this context, United States African Americans did not seem exotic enough to warrant serious anthropological attention. Also, because of the historical role of slavery and the contemporary context of racism, studying U.S. African American culture was an inherently political proposition. Thus, even Sidney Mintz (1970:14), a pioneering theorist and ethnographer of the African diaspora in the tradition of Melville Herskovits, acknowledged that the unequal racial power relations and relative cultural familiarity of U.S. African Americans caused him and other African Americanists to study the corresponding African diasporas of the Caribbean and South America and to avoid North America. Although there is increasing recognition of the contributions of African Americans, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, until recently their role in the early formative stages of the discipline has not been fully acknowledged (see Muller 1992; Harrison 1995; Harrison and Harrison 1998; Sanday 1998a). The cumulative effect of these factors has been the field’s relative marginalization of the anthropology of African American cultural processes.
By default and neglect, until the 1970s and 1980s, race became a surrogate for culture in the study of African American identity. During this period, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Hannerz 1969; Stack 1975), African American cultural dynamics received very little serious attention. The core debates centered on whether African Americans truly possessed a distinctive culture or only pathological adjustments to ghetto poverty (e.g., Frazier 1939; Glazer and Moynihan 1965; Lewis 1966; Liebow 1967). The ghetto focus was a comparison of African American families to white middle-class norms, and its emphasis on social problems had the unintended effect of supporting variations of Lewis’s “culture of poverty” theory as a way of describing African American cultural dynamics. The culture of poverty theory also tended to underplay the active role of racism and unequal employment opportunities as factors in producing poverty and supported genetic explanations of African American culture (see Valentine 1968 and Stack 1975 for critiques of the culture of poverty thesis).
The field of anthropology is just beginning serious study of the African immigrant experience in North America (see Stoller 2002). Unfortunately, immigration studies are generally not very helpful in understanding the new immigration or its African variations. Conventionally, North American immigration studies primarily focused on European origins (Gans 1962; Gordon 1964; Anderson 1974; Handlin 1974; Greene 1975; Lopata 1976) and neglected the study of the African diaspora in North America. Immigration studies were dominated by models of ethnicity and assimilation inherent in the “melting pot” theory (Glazer and Moynihan 1965). As noted by several contemporary theorists (e.g., McDaniel 1995), the melting pot theory did not fully take into account some of the unique aspects of race and racism in the African immigrant experience. Any study of African immigrant identity formation needs to address not only ethnicity but also the social reality of North America’s system of racial stratification and African immigrants’ reaction to it. Recent immigration studies expand the conventional assimilationist “melting pot” theory to accommodate the ways ethnicity and race interface and constrain African immigrant identity formation in North America (Alba 1990; Waters 1990; McDaniel 1995; Sanchez 1997).
Scholars are outlining how various groups, particularly immigrants of African descent, negotiate the United States system of racial classification. Omi and Winant (1986:75) define racialization as a process whereby “previously racially undefined groups” are situated within a prevailing racial order. Sanchez (1997:54) notes that immigrants of African descent, in particular, are directly confronted with this system of racial classification; they are often assigned a racialized status as “Black” or “African American,” on the basis of visible and/or suspected African ancestry, without regard to their particular cultural or political histories. In response, so-called Black immigrants and their descendants may negotiate their identity within certain parameters of choice: they may adhere to a binational identity (e.g., “Jamerican”7); or they may align themselves locally with the African American community and globally with the international African diaspora by identifying as Black (see Bryce-Laporte 1972a; Butcher 1994; Foner 1987; Reid 1939; Waters 1990; Woldemikael 1989a, 1989b).
Drawing on exciting new conceptual models that are beginning to emerge as anthropologists address the complexity of contemporary cultural experience (e.g., Massefoli 1996; Ortner 1997b), immigration studies are also now beginning to accommodate the complex transnational interactions that inform contemporary African immigration to North America. For example, Stoller (1996, 2002) chronicles the economic and political
