Content area
Full Text
Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton & Stephen Small (eds.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xxxviii + 326 pp. (Paper US$ 30.00)
While there is a long and mostly forgotten (or "erased," depending on one's point of view) black presence in European history, the numerical significance of a black community in the continent dates from after World War II and decolonization. Today, the population of the European Union's twentyfive nations is over 450 million. The proportion of people of black African descent is still low, hardly more than 1 percent of the total European population. But as the great majority of these Europeans citizens or denizens of African or African diaspora origins live in the former colonial states in Northwest Europe - France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands - the proportions in these core nations are much higher and more visible, and their proponents are more outspoken.
In some twenty contributions, Black Europe and the African Diaspora attempts to do several things at once, offering both studies on individual countries and episodes and conceptual and theoretical reflections on the meaning of "Blackness," "Black Europe," and "the African Diaspora." Based on a conference held at Northwestern University in 2006, the volume offers a welcome introduction to this theme and introduces readers to debates not familiar to a wider academic audience.
There are several recurring themes. One concerns questions of definition and numbers, a second one the relationship between "Black Europe" and African Americans, and related to these two is a third issue: the struggle for empowerment. The book is organized in three sections: "Historical Dimensions of Blackness in Europe"; "Race and Blackness...