Diaspora: Re-imagining Space and Time

Act IV: Diaspora, re-imagining space and time

Afro-Cuban music is an expression of the African diaspora

“Cuba” also provides us with an opportunity to interrogate the way space and time is commonly imagined, both in the past and the present. It’s easy to lump groups of people, trends, or geographical areas into categories that become the default way of understanding the world. When we scrutinize these categories, we often discover that they misrepresent the way that the world actually is.

Studying the history of the African diaspora provides an opportunity for reframing the categories of history. We usually study black American history as part of United States history, but we can also study it as part of the history of the African diaspora, placing American blacks in the framework of people of African descent all over the world. “Cuba” fits with this framework by placing African Americans in conversation with African Cubans. When viewed from this perspective, St. Paul is remapped as a distant outpost in a massive diaspora of Africans that began with the Atlantic slave trade.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is largely responsible for the African diaspora

Re-imagining “Cuba” as a performance of the African diaspora also places it among a rich history of connections between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. For example, Booker T. Washington’s famous Tuskegee Institute hosted thousands of African descendents from around the world, and Washington actively recruited students from Cuba (52). Washington’s ideology also became famous among Cuban blacks; his autobiography Up From Slavery was translated into spanish and sold thousands of copies in Cuba.

Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, which emerged later in the 1910s, also created a space for forging diasporic bonds among Cuban and American black people. Garveyism imagined the diaspora as a unified nation (perhaps even an empire), and this ideology took hold in Cuba. Cuban Garvey supporters held rallies in Havana, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Garvey’s central organization) had offices there (53). Garvey’s Black Star Lines were designed to link the African diaspora through a network of international trade, and one of its ocean liners made a ceremonial trip from Harlem to Havana, which was marked by speeches and parades (54).

The Yarmouth was a ship owned by Garvey's UNIA as a part of the Black Star Lines. The ship did not engage in real commerce, but functioned as a part of the performance of black nationalism and diaspora.

Arts and culture have also been woven together through the African diaspora. During the 1920s and ‘30s, two cultural movements grew up together in Havana and Harlem: Afro-Cubanism and the Harlem Renaissance. These two movements are often viewed as distinct, but they were actually deeply in conversation with one another (55). For example, famous Harlem poet Langston Hughes visited Havana to great acclaim, and the Cuban influence in some of his poetry is significant (56). Afro-Cuban and African American music have also influenced each other, in everything from jazz to hip hop.

Reframing these stories in terms of the African diaspora also undermines what scholar Amy Kaplan calls “imperial cartography.” She takes this concept from W.E.B. DuBois’ 1920 collection of essays Darkwater, in which he maps struggles in Africa, Europe, and America as all part of a larger network of racial and imperial struggle. Darkwater works to undermine the way that empire has mapped the world: segmenting people, places, ideas, and events into categories that serve the interests of global powers. Studying the history of the African diaspora works similarly, because it connects various oppressed people in a global narrative of struggle and solidarity (57).

This logic can be applied to the world today. What do Chinese factory workers have in common with unemployed black people in Detroit? What do these people have to do with financial elites in London and New York? What is their shared history within global networks of power?