a ze Nupe process, I was actually studying a component of Nupe historicity—the way in which Nupe people conceptualize and remember history based on the convergence of historical events, cultural, and sociopolitical factors. It was difficult to extract an indigenous Nupe model for conceptualizing diversity from the chief’s apparent exposure. I learned later that this exposure to North American notions of identity was largely gained from foreign newspapers, television, and reports of local people who had traveled and lived abroad. Nupe models developed within a transnational cultural flow.
It also became clear, through many incidents similar to the above encounter, that I—and people’s preconceptions and understanding of my own identity as a “Black” person or a person of some sort of African descent—was an unavoidable part of the research context. Whether the notions of the historical connections between Africa and African Americans were considered real, imagined, or invented, the issue was one of active debate whenever I entered a conversation, despite my earnest efforts to keep the group interview focused on “Nupe issues of identity.” Nupe perspectives on my identity and how it influenced the research context were also ethnographic facts that had to be addressed. If I approached this task self-consciously and explicitly (the move to reflexivity and critical analysis of native anthropology were just beginning in the field), the typical debates about my own identity in African diasporan research contexts could add important dimensions to the ethnographic data. On the other hand, if I hid this dimension through the various stylistic artifices possible in ethnographic writing (for example, assumption of the socially neutral, omniscient ethnographer role), I would be contorting the ethnographic data to screen out personally discomforting aspects of the contemporary sociopolitical environment and my perceived role in it.
Yet another experience during this same fieldwork period, this time in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, underscored the importance of transnational cultural flows through the African diaspora in shaping contemporary African identity. I had my hair braided in Ilé-Ifẹ̀ before traveling to my Ìllọrin base for ethnographic site visits to several Nupe villages and towns. The style that I had was not one with which the Ife-Yorùbá hair braider was familiar. It was a style popular among professional African American women in Philadelphia. It involved braiding the hair into cornrows off the face and arranging the resulting cascade of hair that fell to the back of the head into what was known in Philadelphia as a “French twist.” A friend from Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and I talked the braider through adaptations of a classic Yorùbá style to get this Philadelphia-derived, French-twisted design. Well, when I returned from Ìllọrin to Ilé-Ifẹ̀ en route to Lagos for my return to Philadelphia, I was surprised to learn that the painted barbershop sign outside the beautician’s parlor where I had had my hair braided now included the style that the braider created, but it was called the “Sade”—a common Yorùbá female name. When questioning the braider, who was also the shop’s proprietor, about it, she said that several people had subsequently asked her for the style, so she had it added to the barbershop board. She also said that it reminded her of the hairstyle of a London-based rhythm and blues and jazz singer, who is still popular both in the United States and Europe, named “Sade.” The singer also, incidentally, has a Yorùbá father and an English mother. When I returned to Philadelphia, I noticed that many of the braiders that I and my African American friends used were either relatively recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, or native-born African Americans who had adapted some styles imported from Africa. After talking to many of these women, I discovered that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in several cities in the United States, with Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago most prominent among them, mostly African American braiders who were also licensed beauticians, concerned about allegedly unfair and increasing competition from home-based braiders, were leading efforts to create curricula, training programs, and standards for licensing braiders through cosmetology review boards. Many of these home-based braiders, who were not licensed but were making up to $300 per person for the more elaborate styles, were African immigrant and largely low-income African American women working in the informal economy. To more fully explore this issue, through an internship and later consultancy at the Smithsonian Institution’s Program in African American Culture (National Museum of American History and Culture), I conducted an ethnographic study of the aesthetics of the African braiding industry in Washington, D.C., particularly as it related to contemporary African diasporan women’s identity formation. This study not only emphasized the transnational exchange of symbols and images through the contemporary African diaspora but also hinted at what appeared to be the increasing commodification of these images in the contemporary global economy.
Thus, whether I was studying the Aladura religious movement, Nupe historicity, Yorùbá ethnoaesthetics and architecture, or identity politics and economics of African diasporan hairdressing, it became clear that a transnational approach is increasingly necessary to fully understand contemporary African and American cultural experience. This book builds on recent advances in culture theory, African diasporan studies as well as approaches from African diasporan ethnoaesthetics, ethnohistory, literary criticism, and religion (see Soyinka 1976, 1984; Gates 1984, 1988; Apter 1991, 1992; Mintz and Price 1992; Gilroy 1993; Murphy 1994; Chambers 1996). It represents the findings of a twenty-eight-month ethnographic study of the CWC’s work to mobilize the region’s small but relatively diverse and growing African American, African immigrant, and Afro-Caribbean immigrant residents to promote a notion of a shared “African” culture.12
With this ethnographic examination of African diasporan cultural dynamics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, my academic and professional study of African identity formation has come full circle, expanding from its initial focus on such processes in West Africa to include a more global perspective, including the African diaspora as manifested in the United States. The CWC story about creating and promoting a transnational sense of African identity provides ethnographic insights into how people are creating notions of culture, identity, and place in the context of the global cultural interchanges that characterize contemporary urban America.
The research applies the longstanding anthropological study of indigenous African ethnicity to redress the relative neglect by the field, and immigration studies in general, of identity formation processes in North America’s African diaspora. It also extends widely influential ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies in Africanist anthropology (e.g., Kopytoff 1981, 1988; Peel 1983; Comaroff 1985; Barnes 1986; M. Jackson 1986, 1989; Fardon 1988) to the study of the African diaspora in the United States. It attempts to connect these partially disconnected streams of African and African diasporan studies to provide an expanded theoretical pool for interpreting the polyvalent cultural flows that have historically informed and continue to connect Africa and the Americas—from Nigeria’s nineteenth-century “Brazilian” architecture to variations on the African-derived religions in today’s New York City (Barnes 1997). It sees the historical and contemporary cultural interchanges of the African diaspora—and diasporas in general—as providing important case studies that contribute to anthropology’s current effort to understand global cultural formations. In addition to contributing to the movement toward research-driven ethnography in applied settings (Sanday 1976, 1998b; Ahmed and Shore 1995; Reed 1997), the study particularly informs the field’s just emerging interest in the ethnography of the nonprofit sector, particularly the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Escobar 1991, 1995; Ferguson 1994; Weisgrau 1997; W. F. Fisher 1997).
I attempt to apply and combine modified versions of what some scholars consider outmoded constructs—for example, “culture,” “thick ethnographic description,” and social network perspectives—with contemporary processual and reflexive approaches that look at the transnational flow of images and symbols, the construction of identity, and discourses on culture, race, gender, and hegemony, and with a self-consciousness of my sociopolitical role and impact as a native ethnographer.
As fieldwork progressed, it became evident that the intimate issues of health and wellness at the core of the CWC’s community-building agenda focus on the body as a vehicle and agent for cultural recall and revitalization. A more sensual approach to ethnography than is typical in ethnography of immigrant experiences and ethnicity was required. In constructing African identity, CWC was very much attempting
