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Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities. Jean Muteba Rapier, ed. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999. 264 pp.
Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America. Grey Gundaker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 291 pp.
Both books under review offer confirmation, if that were needed, that the study of African diaspora peoples today, no less than six decades ago when Melville Herskovits first published The Myth of the Negro Past, takes place within and against a social context defined by struggles over meaning. One crucial difference between then and now, however, is that at least some scholars more clearly understand that the mythology surrounding "blackness" is not sustained solely through ignorance (as Boas's forthright assault on the false concept of "race" implied). Nor can it alone be dissipated by the accumulation and spread of greater redeeming knowledge about African diaspora cultures (as the work of Herskovits and others sought to do). The sign vehicles through which these peoples are thought, and knowledge about them conveyed, are themselves deeply tainted by their prior and ongoing role in the production of power and inequality. Moreover, the mythology that endows black otherness with special allure serves in complex ways to constitute the dominant "white" self. Contemporary theory generally recognizes that "culture" is more than an autonomous configuration of identifiable forms and ideas. Rather, cultural systems are contiguous and relational. They are shaped and given meaning through processes of mutual engagement and contestation within an overarching political economic order. In writing the black diaspora, then, it becomes crucial to problematize our own representational categories, and to specify the broader social and spatial context, and the particular dynamics of racial subordination, within and against which cultural distinctiveness emerges and is transformed. The contributors to Rahier's edited volume are generally more attentive to these implications for representations of and by black subjects than is Gundaker in her otherwise illuminating book Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs.
Both studies, appropriately, concern themselves with representation and meaning. Both reaffirm the vitality of black diaspora cultures, in Peter Wade's phrase, their "continuously emergent" character. And both implicitly address the persisting paradox that, despite this obvious vitality, black diaspora communities live under the burden of defending...