Black/Africana Communication Theory

353 Pages·2018·3.844 MB·English

by  Kehbuma Langmia

black
/
africana
communication
theory
edited by
kehbuma langmia
Black/Africana Communication Theory
Kehbuma Langmia
Editor
Black/Africana
Communication
Theory
Foreword by Ronald L. Jackson II
Editor
Kehbuma Langmia
Department of Strategic, Legal and
Management Communication
School of Communications
Howard University
Washington, DC, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-75446-8 ISBN 978-3-319-75447-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75447-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934711
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This book has been dedicated to those who fervently believe that Black
Scholars Matter.
F : A T U
oreword ool For ndersTAnding
A d
The FricAn iAsporA
The foundation of every Diaspora can be found in its ideals, mores, beliefs,
and culture—its way of doing things. Moreover, the basis for any curricu-
lum about that Diaspora resides within its theories. The theories foretell
the intricacies of the discursive practices that guide how citizens of the
Diaspora behave. To date there has been no one book that has been exclu-
sively dedicated to showcasing Black/Africana communication paradigms,
but now we have it in Kehbuma Langmia’s book Black/Africana Com­
munication Theory.
Of course the function of theories is to provide us with conceptual tools
to use when trying to make sense of what we are observing. The contem-
porary social landscape throughout the African Diaspora, no matter
whether it is in Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Australia,
Antarctica, or Europe, provides us with a plethora of phenomena to
explore no matter whether it is Boko Haram of Nigeria, the Stolen
Generation of Australia, the Afroasiatic identity of Ongota, or any number
of African places, events, rituals, and aboriginal people groups throughout
the Diaspora. While it is impossible to have a book with theories to suffi-
ciently describe every phenomenon what Black/Africana Communication
Theory offers is an ambitious explication of theories that rigorously unrav-
els an African-centered set of human experiences, habits, and practices.
The urgency of the need for intellectual minds to attend to the social
quagmires in which we find ourselves is significant now more than ever.
The African Diaspora is grasping for answers for the collapse of democra-
cies all around the world. Even in the United States the democratic ideal,
and its accompanying promises of freedom, equity, and fairness, is called
vii
viii FOREWORD: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
into question daily. Higher education institutions cannot decide whether
their principal interests are to prepare students to be global citizens or to
simply make money. While these are not mutually exclusive, since it is pos-
sible to have both coexist simultaneously, the neoliberalist charge to con-
stitute the national identities of all Americans on the basis of capitalism
alone is debilitating. It runs counter to African sensibilities, which value
the collective and seek to lift up others as we individually progress. In fact
what this book will show is that the notion of the individual is a principally
Western concept that seems misplaced when discussed alongside African
Diaspora perspectives.
What is not so strange within the Diaspora is the need to protect an
authentic sense of African values defined by ethics, language and discourse,
belonging, holism, interconnectedness, social support, and self-efficacy
through community. This need intensifies in places where African peoples
have been colonized, because they have already experienced an assault on
their cultural way of being. In many cases, whether through the Maafa
known as the holocaust of enslavement or through some other devastating
transition, the Diaspora spread geographically when Black people arrived
in places where they were subjugated. Under colonial rule, where in many
cases they were not permitted to speak their native tongue, they had to
find a way to adjust psychologically, linguistically, and culturally in order
to survive. The emergence of pidgins and eventually creoles often hap-
pened out of a need to communicate with other Africans during this dis-
persion and resettlement process where for example African people who
spoke Hausa had to learn to speak to other Africans who spoke Igbo,
Kiswahili, Yoruba, Zulu, Fulani, Berber, or one or more of almost a hun-
dred other languages spoken on the continent. One of the principal con-
sequences of colonialism was a gradual loss of various aspects of indigenous
African identities with each new generation detached from the physical
continent of Africa.
Retrieval over the custody of meanings, practices, mores, and values
reflecting classical African antiquity has been an uphill battle for Africans
who have been removed from Africa for several generations. The famous
Melville Herskovitz and E. Franklin Frazier debate discussed in Holloway’s
(2005) book Africanisms in American Culture attempts to grapple with
whether Blacks in America and elsewhere can legitimately claim an African
identity at all, or whether who they are today is to be regarded as some-
thing entirely separate and distinct from an indigenous African identity. In
other words, is there any such thing as an African carryover or continuity
or is that nonsense? This ultimately begs the question, for example, of
whether African Americans are more African or American.
FOREWORD: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AFRICAN DIASPOR A ix
The fact that we continue to be compelled to ask this ontological and
cosmological question is a result of most of the African Diaspora’s physical
detachment from Africa and our divided cultural consciousness. Fortunately
we have had the benefit of many brilliant writers over the years such as
Chinua Achebe (2016), Chiek Anta Diop (1989, 1991), Jahnheinz Jahn
(1994), Marcel Griaule (1975), Chancellor Williams (1992), Molefi Asante
(2013), Maulana Karenga (2008), and others who have sought to not just
acknowledge the antecedent conditions that led to the spread of the
Diaspora but also work to reinstate the significance of human agency by
critiquing and establishing paradigms intended to reflect Africanity. They
understood the phrase “Know Thyself,” a phrase that emerged from early
African dynasties over 3000 years ago and has been claimed by Greek,
Chinese, Hindu, and other cultures throughout the world. The phrase sug-
gests more than what its literal meaning signifies, which presumably is to
get to know your origins and how you define yourself. It is also a phrase that
captures the past, present, and future implying self-knowledge across time.
In coming to know the people who belong to the African Diaspora we
need paradigms and models to help us make sense of the cultural behavior
and discourse patterns we are observing. For example how do the wailing
and memorial service practices in Ghana compare to the way we memori-
alize the deceased in Jamaica, Brazil, China, or the United States?
Questions like these encourage us to pause and consider the vastness of
the African continent as a point of origin for the Diaspora, a place with 54
independent countries and hundreds of languages. To say one’s ancestors
are from Africa is a complex assertion. One must take time to locate which
part of Africa and what traditions are distinctive to that region.
Recently I received my results from the Ancestry.com DNA test I took.
I was delighted to learn that the findings showed that I am 86 % African
with most of my ancestral heritage concentrated in Nigeria, Ghana,
Benin/Togo, and Cameroon. While this revelation was exciting I almost
immediately felt overwhelmed by how much I still have to learn about
those African countries. I have been reading about Africa for the last 30
years but I feel like I know almost nothing about my ancestral heritage. I
do not know much about the foods, languages, dialects, dress, rights of
passage, and collective identities of those regions. African Americans have
been told for centuries that they have African ancestral roots. This DNA
science helps us to move one step closer to understanding our family tree,
medical histories, and so on. Even still it takes books like Black/Africana
Communication Theory to guide us in our attempts to retrieve aspects of
our Diaspora culture.
x FOREWORD: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
What this book reveals, if you read closely, is that there are at least four
functions of the African Diaspora, and I suspect this is the case for all
Diasporas: (1) to coalesce dispersed people who share the same ancestral
origin; (2) to track and ensure African continuities, cultural carryovers, and
what Maulana Karenga (2008) calls kawaida (traditions) regardless of geo-
graphical location; (3) to solidify public remembrance and regard for
the history, heroes, aesthetics; and (4) to empower and facilitate agency of
the people of the Diaspora through shared values and stories of greatness.
The first function of coalescence is critically important because dispersed
peoples take on new national cultural norms and daily ways of being. They
are susceptible to the kind of cultural amnesia that Molefi Asante argues is
a product of a dislocated cultural consciousness. Even if the Diaspora suc-
ceeds with the first function the identities of the dispersed people needs to
be understood. There is a famous line in Spike Lee’s movie School Daze
where the character Julian/Dean Big Brother Al-might-ty (played by
Giancarlo Esposito) is invited to a rally about divestment from South Africa
and he disdainfully replies, “I’m from Detroit—Motown!” This is awfully
telling as we think about what happens when a people have lost connection
with their homeland. He did not imagine himself as African and recoiled at
the mere mention of such a linkage. The third function is to remember the
Diaspora through how we tell about our history. This retelling of history
signifies our desires and shapes our worldviews. This function of remem-
brance is just as much about telling the history as it is about the final func-
tion, which is empowerment. By empowerment I mean that Diasporas
function to help their dispersed people to cope psychologically, linguisti-
cally, and emotionally. It helps them to understand that they still have a
purpose and have the agency to find value and success in their lives. When
a child is introduced to heroes in their own respective culture it reminds
them that they are an offspring of greatness and a destiny of success is theirs
to achieve.
The functions of Diasporas are directly aligned with the paradigms that
essentially embody and re-enliven those functions. For example when Molefi
Asante’s (2013) discussed the concept of “afrocentricity” he describes it as
a lens through which we can conceptually address a sense of “decentered-
ness” among dispersed Africans “recognizing that Africans in the Diaspora
had been deliberately de-culturalized and made to accept the conqueror’s
codes of conduct and modes of behavior” (p. 31). The beauty of this book
Black/Africana Communication Theory edited by Kehbumia Langmia is
that we now have an additional communication-focused interdisciplinary
FOREWORD: A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AFRICAN DIASPOR A xi
resource that works to apprehend critical elements of the African Diaspora.
Its value will become increasingly more significant as the world becomes
more transient, as the digital Diasporas expand, and as those in the African
Diaspora seek to better understand their own ancestry.
University of Cincinnati Ronald L. Jackson
Cincinnati, OH, USA
reFerences
Achebe, C. (2016). Arrow of God. New York: Penguin.
Asante, M. (2013). Afrocentricity: Imagination and Action. Malaysia: Multiversity
and Citizens International.
Diop, C. A. (1989). The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Chicago:
Chicago Review Press.
Diop, C. A. (1991). Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Griaule, M. (1975). Conversations With Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon
Religious Ideas. London: International African Institute.
Holloway, J. E. (2005). Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Jahn, J. (1994). Muntu: African Culture and the Western World. New York: Grove.
Karenga, M. (2008). Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle: African
American, Pan­African and Global Issues. Los Angeles: University of Sankore
Press.
Williams, C. (1992). Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from
4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Chicago: Third World Press.