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- Convenors:
-
Sakiko Nakao
(CESSMA, Paris-Diderot University)
Odile Goerg (Paris Diderot University)
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Short Abstract:
This panel aims to explore the complex relations between African people and people of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean, during the 1950s and 1960s, when new issues became apparent as the postcolonial society was being re-shaped in and around.
Long Abstract:
While the African diaspora is known today as the 6th region of the African Union, the gaps and tensions laying under the Pan-Africanism are often overlooked. This panel aims to explore the complex relations between African people and people of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean, through their conceptions of "Africa", while also taking diversities within each group into account. If Pan-Africanism brought together Africans living within and outside the "continent", it also highlighted the discrepancies among them. This was especially the case during the 1950s and 1960s when new issues became apparent at the advent of African Independent States in the Cold War context. Pan-African networks was then torn between an idealized image of African past and emerging problems of Modernity confronted by the nations-to-be. Accelerating urbanization, as well as changing life styles and social relations pointed out the ambiguity of the image associated to Africa. As the postcolonial society was being re-shaped in and around, Pan-African discourses conflicted with constraints of the nation-building. Within the new urban spaces, the emancipation of women, to whom the role of guardian of the "tradition" has been assigned, became one of the crucial issues. Special attention shall be paid to the marginalized actors, making use of Pan-Africanist ideas to transform social norms to their advantage. We also welcome papers focusing on social practices in daily lives implementing or exceeding Pan-African discourses. Sources may vary from local press, writings of activists, to iconographic, filmographic and sound archives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
My paper will look at the ways in which Nkrumah's newspapers in Gold Coast championed the idea and methods of nonviolent action. Named and pseudonymous authors explained how Ghanaians are rational and self-controlled, unlike the more brutish British who rely on force.
Paper long abstract:
When Kwame Nkrumah went back to Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1947 to become involved in the struggle for independence from British colonialism there, he was highly committed to two ideals at the time, both articulated in the 5th PAC Manifesto (which he helped draft at the 1945 PAC in Manchester, England): first, that the time was ripe for African countries to gain full political independence from their colonial masters; and second, that they should gain this independence through Gandhian-inspired nonviolent methods. Nkrumah started his own newspaper, Accra Evening News, which carried many articles warning that, if necessary, people would resort to Positive Action as a last recourse against British intransigence. My paper will look at the ways in which Nkrumah's newspapers in Gold Coast championed the idea and methods of nonviolent action. Named and pseudonymous authors explained how Ghanaians are rational and self-controlled, unlike the more brutish British who rely on force. The news and opinion articles will be compared to Nkrumah's more direct communication in "What I Mean by Positive Action." Nkrumah's approach was tied into the rhetoric and tactics of a much larger movement against colonialism, but the newspapers attest to a particular understanding and approach adopted to the Ghanaian context. The Pan-African movement was further shaped in the next few years by the influx of outsiders who, like Bill Sutherland, advocated for the continuance of nonviolent action, and Frantz Fanon, who, as conference attendee and then Ambassador to Ghana, did not want violence ruled out.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the Pan-African encounter of Congolese musicians and Louis Armstrong in Léopoldville, Congo, in 1960 to show how African and African-American musicians dealt with their divergent and idealized representations of Africa and Black Atlantic music in a moment of diasporic intimacy.
Paper long abstract:
On October 1960, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars band gave a performance in the newly independent Léopoldville (today Kinshasa) as part of an African tour organized by the US government. The star received a warm welcome as local dignitaries swapped their normal Western attire for more exotic garb and artists performed traditional dances and songs in tribute to the trumpeter. As Congolese rumba, a highly popular style influenced by Afro-Cuban music, had emerged as the main "modern Congolese music", we shall ask why local stars who embodied the urban and cosmopolitan lifestyle such as Joseph Kabasele welcomed Armstrong with performances of an atavistic Africa. If some research has drawn attention to his role of "race artist" in the context of the Cold War (Eschen 2009), and to his first African show in 1956 Gold Coast (today Ghana) (Collins 1996, Jaji 2014), his visit to Congo has never been studied. By examining this event as well as local reactions to Armstrong's jazz performance, this paper shows how Congolese and African-American musicians dealt with their divergent and idealized representations of Africa and Black Atlantic music in a moment of "diasporic intimacy" (Feld 2012). Informed by a series of interviews made during 2014 fieldwork in Kinshasa among musicians and through archival research in the Belgian "Africa Archives", this paper sheds light on the dystopic nature of one of the first Pan-African artistic encounters of the period.
Paper short abstract:
To fully comprehend the tumultuous years that saw francophone Africa changing in political status from territories in the French Union to independent nation-states in 1960, it is key to analyze what scholarship has overlooked: persistent yet changing conceptions of African multiracial identities.
Paper long abstract:
To fully comprehend the tumultuous years that saw francophone Africa changing in political status from territories in the French Union to independent nation-states in 1960, this paper contends that it is important to analyze what history scholarship has overlooked: persistent yet changing conceptions of African multiracial identities and of "métis" as a distinct racial, legal, social and cultural form of personhood. Racial thought within African societies in these years of profound historical change went beyond ideas about "blackness," but articulations that there were three sets of racial groups in the configuration of African futures: black, white, and métis. In these years, persons claiming métis personhood within AOF and AEF based on genealogical descent from a "white" parent who had French metropolitan nationality reached out to each other beyond their individual colonies and regions. They articulated a pan-African and international form of collective racial identity from which to claim certain human rights for those who were "métis" based on this particular line of genealogical descent. These ideas contested those of political actors and intellectuals who forwarded the idea of "nègritude" as a basis of pan-African anticolonial and antiracist mobilization. These ideas and persons coalesced in two International Congress of Métis, one held in Brazzaville in 1957 and the other in Neu-Asel Germany in 1959.