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In-Depth Information
izedspacesthatlinkEuropeinextricablywithAfrica(Hanchard2006).Afro-Italiansex-
perience place in Italy through what Thomas and David have called the “long durée” of
colonial history, in which the transcolonial national, ethnic, and racial borders between
Africa and Europe are porous, overlapping, and ambiguous (Thomas and David 2006).
Among people from former European colonies, the meanings of place and belonging
are particularly fraught. They are connected with interlocking and conflictual histories
around collective identities dominated, or at least strongly influenced by, and con-
tinually bound together with European political and cultural institutions and modern
European racialized formations (Winant 1994; Hall 1991a, 1991b, 2003). This is not to
suggestthattherehasnotbeenagreatdealofresistanceorthatAfricanpoliticalandcul-
tural institutions were erased; on the contrary, African cosmologies and practices have
beenreproducedwithincolonialrupturesandformsofdisplacementinwhatStuartHall,
borrowing Leopold Senghor and Aimée Césaire's metaphor, describes as a continuous
“Présence Africaine” that is a source of inspiration, agency, and creation. Yet there is
also always in African Diasporic formations a “Présence Européenne,” a troubling as-
pect of identity because the European presence has been so overwhelming, introducing
the issue of power through imposition, exclusion, force, and appropriation. Hall cau-
tionsthatmovementsamongformercolonizedpeopletolocatethePrésenceEuropéenne
as external, and to separate all that it represents from their cultural identities rooted in
Africa is problematic, for the many dimensions of the European influence are irrevers-
ible and its presence also continues (Hall 2003). In their everyday practices, these post-
colonial immigrants embody both Africa and Europe. This can be applied more widely
to all Africans whose lives have been touched in varying degrees by European coloniz-
ation, and it takes on some unique and compelling dimensions for those who have re-
centlymigratedtoEurope(Brown2005;Keaton2006;Carter1997,2010;Hine,Keaton,
and Small 2009).
That intersections of identity and place become more complex in a world of increas-
ing and routine mobility and displacement is not a new area of theoretical inquiry. The
first wave of path breaking reflections on the topic appeared in the early 1990s (Ap-
padurai 1990; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc
1994; Malkki 1992). Much of this work argued that displaced social actors formed mul-
tiple transnational attachments to geographically distant places through daily commu-
nication, memory, and communication technologies. These approaches tended to under-
theorize or elide analyses of the ways that the long durée of colonial and neocolonial
power relations grounded in Eurocentric racial hierarchies have remained pivotal antag-
onisms for social actors who are part of the African Diaspora (Marable 2008).
Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, Black British cultural theorists, have offered early note-
worthy exceptions, focusing on how people from the Caribbean and African countries
