The spoken word was critical for expressing and knowing the African reality the CWC was attempting to create. However, a methodology that privileges the written or spoken word over other ways of knowing would misconstrue a critical dimension of the CWC’s mission. Therefore, an explicit effort is made to accommodate multiple modes of expression—the sounds, smells, and rhythms that comprise the aesthetics of the CWC’s identity formation process.
Drawing on current approaches in sensorial anthropology and embodiment theory (see Howes 1991; M. Jackson 1983, 1989; Stoller 1989, 1987, 1996), the study is sensitive to the various ways the CWC’s “African” leadership combines dialogical, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and oral modes of sensing, knowing and expressing reality—their lived, embodied experience of Africanness.13 I attempt to present what the CWC’s “African” leadership calls the “African way of seeing and knowing the world.” In an effort to convey the intimate, lived, embodied experience of CWC participants I cite at length class and support group conversations as well as staff meetings, without any specific participant attribution. To fully comprehend and convey the insider’s point of view on cultural wellness and identity formation required more than ethnographic interviewing and detached participation in meetings. I sometimes engaged in a rather rigorous—and physically challenging—form of intensive participant observation involving classes, staff and volunteer planning sessions, community meetings, and special events. This gave me multiple points of view on experiences of participants as well as a sense of the physical sensations they felt as something the CWC leadership considered to be a core component in the transformative identity formation process.
Special attention is given to the way participants felt about the CWC’s spatial environment—its smell, design, decor, and ambiance—all of which figured prominently in interviews and comments. Photographs (see Appendix B), most of which were taken by a CWC participant and part-time teacher who also happened to be a professional photographer, aid this effort to depict the comprehensive, affective sense of Africanness that many participants felt was conveyed by the CWC’s space.
Firm boundaries between African and African American are increasingly difficult to sustain with the accelerating global flow of peoples and cultures across continents. I hope that this ethnographic study of contemporary African diasporan identity formation in the North American nongovernmental sector contributes to the field’s ongoing journey to help theory and practice catch up to this important piece of African peoples’ cultural reality.
This book is divided into three major sections with chapters that document the CWC’s strategies to create embodied African culture and community. The prologue and Part I, Reimagining North America’s African Diaspora, set the personal, theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, political, and demographic context for the study. Part II, Across Diasporan Space/Time, considers the question: Who is “African” in a world of global cultural flows, meanings, and connections? I present the CWC participants’ sometimes conflicting theories of African identity and the leadership’s attempts to organize them into a coherent theory and practice of African healing and culture. I show how the CWC’s cultural wellness discourse on African identity is an indirect form of resistance to dominant notions of race, class, and culture. Part III, Creating “Africa”: A State of Mind/Body/Spirit, asks the question: How does the CWC promote embodiment of African identity, community, and culture? Specifically, I examine how various support group meetings and movement classes work to transform the CWC’s concepts of diversity into a visceral experience of African wellness and healing that displace territory as the locus of African culture and community. The epilogue to this journey through the Twin Cities African diaspora presents how the context has changed in the post-September 11 period. I also discuss how the CWC case, and the community-based nonprofit sector more generally, might inform theory and practice in our discipline.
Part I
Reimagining North America’s African Diaspora
… as anthropology increasingly abandons the idea that cultures can be treated as integrated wholes … we would do well to look at those African American communities that … defined themselves in neodiffusionist terms as nations apart, diasporas, and transnational communities, long before postcolonial theory made it fashionable to recognize that many non-African communities do so as well.
—J. Lorand Matory, “Revisiting the African Diaspora”
1
“Africa” in Minnesota
The Cultural Wellness Center (CWC) was located on the major commercial strip of the Powderhorn neighborhood, a key crossroads in the Twin Cities’ changing demographic landscape.1 At one time, this busy intersection was a major commercial corridor in midtown Minneapolis. The corridor declined significantly over the past five years as major businesses, for example, a large Sears department store, left the area. No longer called “midtown” Minneapolis in the media, to the chagrin of local activists who emphasized the neighborhood’s notable cultural and socioeconomic assets, the area was popularly referred to as the “inner city.” In the media, the area was, unfortunately, known for its growing violent crime rate and drug trade, although many economic development projects were under way to revitalize it. Local merchants organized with nonprofits to create a business association that promoted the area’s development. There were plans to redevelop the Sears site, several major business and health care facilities anchored the neighborhood’s economy, and there were a growing number of small businesses, including several that were Asian, Chicano, Latino, or African immigrant owned.
Across the street from the CWC was the Lagos International Market and an African music shop. Farther down the block was a Somali recording studio that also sold Somali music and was becoming a community meeting place. Several shops down was an African bookstore owned by a Kenyan immigrant. In an office across from the CWC on the second floor of a drug store was the Association for Hmong Women, which used the CWC’s space for community meetings, youth gatherings, and folk dance classes. There was a Mexican restaurant and an Indian curry house on the same block. About a half block from the CWC’s offices was Ingebretsen’s, a well-known store established in the neighborhood for about eighty years, specializing in Scandinavian foods and handicrafts.2 A couple of blocks up from this store on the same boulevard were various specialty shops patronized by an international clientele including Latino Catholics, African people of various backgrounds (immigrants from different countries as well as American-born), as well as an interethnic group of White American Wiccans, that is, witches, many of whom identified themselves as feminists reconnecting with the lost healing traditions of pre-Christian Europe.
When I first started working in Powderhorn, this daily comingling of aromas—curry, tortillas, and lutefisk—with the sounds of West African high life and Tejano gave this corner of Minneapolis a disorienting, out-of-place, surreal flavor not found in the region until very recently. This is the story of a translocal nonprofit’s effort to create a sense of place—a sense of home—for the many different peoples living in the Twin Cities and its African diaspora.
The CWC was actually located in a bank building owned and operated by a nonprofit housing developer. There were no outdoor signs identifying the center. In fact, the only outdoor signs were those of the bank. Unless you were observant enough to notice the distinctive colorful curtains and large picture windows, one might not even know the CWC was inside.
As you walked into the bank building, you entered double doors into a hallway. On one side there was the bank—a rather small neighborhood branch—distinguished by very large and colorful papier-mache
