An Apology for the African Diaspora: Race, regret, and Reconciliation

Résumé 0

I propose to examine how the social relations of people of African descent have been affected by the development of two competing discourses-one of ’diaspora’ and the other of ’apology’. It is my hope to analyze the tense dialectic between these two ways of thinking about the fate and future of people of African descent. These two discourses-political apologies and diaspora-promote particular ways to understand the conditions and meaning of the African dispersal. Each of them has a distinct historical grounding and political trajectory. Diaspora offers us a historical account of disruption that focuses simultaneously on origins and dispersals, at the same time as it produces a political account of the value of the idea of a political community emphatically not set in a nation-state. Political apologies provide a penitent mapping out of historical acts that are now identified as atrocities, while promoting a political future in which that penitence is translated from political sorrow to political goodwill. These two discourses also have different implications for how ’race’ is understood. Race was a product of the diaspora in that it united a people by imagining a continental provenance that had hitherto been an unimagined community. In the discourse of apology, on the other hand, race has been invoked in problematic ways, from those who positively affirmed that the ubuntu ethic of forgiveness was an attribute of the ’African worldview’ (Tutu), to those who more skeptically saw a new form of race-thinking in the repeated apologies for the slave trade-that in this dynamic ’To err is human, to forgive, African’ (Soyinka). In this project, I wish to study more comprehensively the different strategies, premises, and outcomes of these discourses, and the ways they produce occasions of race-that is, moments when race is remade in ways that are more or less restrictive and more or less disabling.