Cinema of the African Diaspora

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Slavery
The African Diaspora
Commentaries from the Sources
Camera Work
Sound Track
Conclusion
Reference

Introduction

Sentiments accompany many films that depict culture, and this includes most narratives about groups of people. While cinema may have evolved as a major means of entertainment as popularized by Hollywood, entertainment itself has come to encompass various genre of storytelling. From silent, black & white films that depict antics easily understood by a wide range of audience, to the so-called “indie” or low-budgeted, low-key films from previously unknown directors, writers or casts. It is through this evolving form of genre that films tackling ethnicity issues such as diaspora have voices “outside” mainstream Hollywood started to get heard.

Diaspora is an ethno-cultural phenomenon with the term rooted from diaspora, Greek, διασ word πορά – that means a scattering or sowing of seeds, and eventually evolved to mean forcing of any group of people or ethnic population to leave their traditional homelands. There is the dispersal of these people leading to changes and developments in their culture. Originally, the term diaspora meant “the scattered” used by the ancient Greeks that referred to citizens of dominant city-states. These, mainly led by soldiers or warriors, emigrated to conquered lands with the purpose of colonization as well as to assimilate the territory into the empire. However, the now prevalent meaning derailed from its original sense apparently after the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. Diaspora was used in this instance to refer to the population of Jews exiled from Judea ca 586 BC by the Babylonians, and from Jerusalem in AD 136 by the Roman Empire.

Later, diaspora was referred interchangeably with historical movements of dispersed ethnic population of Israel, the cultural development of that population, or the population itself and the Greek term assimilated into English by mid-20th century. Other reference includes refugees of other origins or ethnicities although the two terms are far from synonymous but pertains only to the mass movement of one ethnicity to another place.

In African diaspora, it involves the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world. Places of destination include the predominant Americas, then to Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the world. The vast majority of African diaspora descended from people who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade and the largest population are said to be in Brazil. It was said that the people of Sub-Saharan descent is estimated to be more that 900 million and represents about 14% of the world’s population (Dodson and Sylviane, 2005).

Slavery

The majority of African migrants are dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas during the Atlantic and Arab slave trades starting in the 9th century. Slaves were taken from the northern and eastern portions of the continent into the Middle East and Asia. By the start of the 15th century, Africans were taken from the rest of the continent, most specifically West Africa. They were brought to Europe and to the Americas with the Arab and Atlantic slave trades ending only in the 19th century (EB, 2007).

The dispersal through slave trading is one of the colossal examples of diaspora in human history devastating the economy of an entire continent. Many communities from descendants of sub-Saharan African slaves in Europe and Asia survived to the modern day but Africans intermarried with non-Africans and their descendants blended into the local population. The mix of multiple racial groups from around the world, specifically in the Americas, created a widespread mixing bowl effect. An example is in Central and South America where most people descended from European, American Indian, and African ancestry. Likewise, in Brazil, where nearly half the population was descended from African slaves, variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range (Olson, 2003). In the United States, racist Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws maintained a distinction between racial groups lead to the adoption of the one drop rule which defined anyone with any discernible African ancestry as African even though the strictest application of that rule would categorize nearly all Americans as African (Olson, 2003).

The start of Spanish activity in the Americas had Africans present both as voluntary expeditionaries and involuntary colonists (Warren, 1985) as exemplified by Juan Garrido, a black conquistador who crossed the Atlantic as a freedman in the 1510s and participated in the siege of Tenochtitlan (Warren, 1985).

The African Diaspora

The current population of recent African immigrants to the United States alone is estimated to be more that 600,000. Origin countries with the most immigrants to the U.S. include Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and South Africa. Other immigrants came from Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, and Cameroon. Immigrants typically congregate in urban areas, moving to suburban areas over time. Likewise, there is a significant portion of population of African immigrants in many other countries around the world, including the UK and France (Mensah, 2006).

There had been identified several migration waves to the Americas. These include relocations within the Americas that brought people of African descent to North America. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture reported that the first African populations came to North America in the 16th century through Mexico and the Caribbean to the Spanish colonies of Florida, Texas and other parts of the South (Dodson and Sylviane, 2005). There were about 12 million people from Africa who were shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade (Segal, 1995). An estimated 645,000 were shipped to the British colonies on the North American mainland and the United States. Berendt (1999) estimated that an additional 1,840,000 were shipped to other British colonies, mainly the West Indies. By 2000, African Americans comprised 12.1 % of the total population in the United States, the largest racial minority group concentrated in the southern states and urban areas (Dodson and Sylviane, 2005).

People of African descent, however, also engaged in eleven other migration movements involving North America since the 16th century as voluntary migrations. These were believed to have been influenced by exploitative and hostile environments (Dodson and Sylviane, 2005). People from sub-Saharan Africa, specifically from West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands, started to arrive in a voluntary immigration wave to seek employment as whalers in Massachusetts in the 1860s. The migration went on until restrictive laws were enacted in 1921 disallowing entry of non-Europeans. Nevertheless, people of African ancestry were already a majority in New England’s whaling industry working as sailors, blacksmiths, shipbuilders, officers, and owners until they settled to California (Warren, 1985). Dodson and Sylviane (2005) suggested that about 1.7 million people in the United States descended from voluntary immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

Commentaries from the Sources

By now, it is symbolical that the African Diaspora as popularly conceived denotes the dispersed people that are removed or exiled from a common territorial origin, the sub-Saharan Africa. The term diaspora was employed by intellectuals by 1950s involved in pan-Africanism aiming to raise consciousness and create solidarity among Blacks all over (Shepperson, 1993).

Mark Reid (1993) elevated the critique of black Hollywood movies that includes some by black independents, to a critical theory of African American film. His book Redefining Black Film has seven chapters discussing early films of the Foster Photoplay Company to the more recent films of Spike Lee and John Singleton. Instead of providing a historical survey of black cinema, Reid analyzed a selection of films to support various aspects of his theory. He examined feature-length movies about black people within three fundamental categories – comedy, family, and action in the first chapter. This created a conceptual frame for his historical view of black filmmaking. The next chapters had him analyze films representing blackface, hybrid, and satiric hybrid variants of each genre focusing on advocating Alice Walker’s black womanist perspective and embracing a quasi-essentialist notion of black independent cinema.

Lott (1995) opined that Reid’s theory suffers from underdevelopment in several crucial respects such as rendition of conception of African American cinema in terms of minstrelsy. The organization of the book showed that he wanted this conception to contrast sharply with the non-comedic paradigm of diaspora in black independent film (Lott, 1995). He has reduced the African American film image to nothing more than “comedy subtypes” and “their facsimiles in other genres” (p 43). The distinction between studio-financed, produced, or distributed films and those that were independent from this kind of white control became his cornerstone of revisionism with heavy emphasis on the influence of minstrelsy Lott, 1995).

Another flaw on Reid is his indiscriminate use of the term black interchangeably with the term African American signifying lack of differences between filmmaking in Africa, America, Australia, Europe, and the Caribbean (Lott, 1995). In Chapter 5, Reid shifts from giving a quite critical assessment of Spike Lee to heaping uncritical praise on diaspora filmmakers from England, Australia, Cuba, and Africa. Here, he provides some sense in which African American independent films are properly situated among other black diaspora films.

Reid proposed that, if Blacks saw humor in Amos ‘n’ Andy, then apparently they laughed for a different reason than did whites stating, “When a comedy film objectifies blacks, it produces both pleasure and pain for both racial groups, but such feelings are not of the same quality and, therefore, must be differentiated,” (p 25).

Reid (1993) also sweeps on talk about an “interested” audience and talk about a black audience but vague on how the two are related. Reid also suggested that, “black womanist films that depict nonsexist men may threaten the psychologic desires of certain feminists – for example, separatists who deplore any feminism that includes men,” further adding, “certain pan-Africans… might view black feminism as a threat to black communal solidarity…” (p 115). This makes a most interesting aspect of Reid’s theory about audience reception. He patterned after Bakhtin, and analyzed black film in terms of a dialogical relation between readers and texts. He argued that audiences are not passive, inert receptacles absorbing monologue meanings from the screen, but are actually engaged in dialogue. The film referred to their own cultural frame audiences, reinterpreting what are depicted on the screen differently from the supposed meanings.

Reid said that, “in the production and reception of minstrel and hybrid minstrel comedies, whites can produce racial myths, believe myths that support their imagined racial superiority, or feel maligned by the production of these myths and create an oppositional form of reception.” However, Blacks were, “permitted only the last two of these choices, both of which require black spectators to use oppositional strategies of reception,” (p 25) suggesting that both black and white spectators can resist a racist film discourse and that resistance cannot be what distinguishes black and white audience reactions to Amos ‘n’ Andy.

Reid (1993) also suggested that a film about black people must be controlled from writing to distribution by black people in order to count as black independent cinema, but he also pointed out that, “proposing assumes an interracial audience,” (p 42).

Reid observed that the market for black films is divided along class lines where Black independent films seem to circulate only in academic, museum, film festival circles. Studio-affiliated films are generally meant for a mass audience. Since in both cases there is financial backing by whites for films about black people that were made for a largely white audience of different segments. Reid suggests that, “since governmental agencies wanted to ameliorate the socioeconomic causes of urban uprisings and educate the American public, they preferred to finance and distribute social documentaries rather than experimentation and fiction films,” (p 127). This was seen in the case of the PBS over Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied, corporate financing and final approval by granting agencies can influence the making of black independent films in a fashion similar to the influence exerted by Hollywood studios (Lott, 1995).

Camera Work

While diaspora is an altogether unique theme for every ethnicity, Marks (1998) suggested relations of ethnography with filmmaking. She observed that ethnographic filmmaking has undergone a complete transformation during the recent decades previously explored by scientists seeking imagery of exotic cultures into ethnographic filmmaking as a fertile ground for Third World and avant-garde filmmakers.

Diawara (1993) suggested that Black American cinema may be examined from two perspectives: focus on the artist or his representation of the Black imaginary or imagery, and in broader sense his place within communities. In The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915) started a representation of Black people in Hollywood, challenging a racist America, “against Black people… the grammar book for Hollywood’s representation of Black manhood and womanhood, its obsession with miscegenation, and its fixing of Black people within certain spaces, such as kitchens, and into certain supporting roles, such as criminals, on the screen,” (Diawara, 1993, p 3). This further gave recognition to race films, of which Hollywood is notorious for recognizing Black people’s role on screen as “a problem, a torn in America’s heel. Hollywood’s Blacks exist for White spectators… [to] thematize exotic images dancing and singing on the screen, or images constructed to narrate a racial drama, or images of pimps and muggers…” (Diawara, 1993, p 3).

On one hand, the Ghanaian popular cinema industry, which emerged at the end of the 1980s reflect urban people’s struggles, concerns about occult forces, and their dreams about a modern way of life. They are said to be low budget movies screened in regular cinemas, but have become a major source of popular entertainment in the country’s urban south (Meyer, 1999). However, the intellectual elites and established film makers were viewed to be highly critical of these films because of the “disrespect” shown with regard to African culture. Meyer (1999) addressed the conflict by focusing on perceived differences between high art and popular cinema comparing Kwa Ansah’s internationally much-acclaimed Heritage Africa with popular films such as Nana King’s Beast Within and A. Hackman’s Not Without. Meyer (1999) further argued that these two types of films approach different audiences with different problems with the former concerned with the emancipation of the colonized intellectual and seek to restore authentic cultural roots, and the latter focus on the intricacies of ordinary people’s lives in the city lacking any rigid opposition between African tradition and European modernity. Modernity is presented in the context of everyday life (Meyer, 1999).

In Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Zeinabu irene Davis’ Mother of the River, the films obtained themes from oral tradition preserved through generations of African Americans (Ogunleye, 2007).The films reaffirmed the African dignity through a commemoration of African culture and its persevering importance in the lives of Africans in the Diaspora. Ogunleye (2007) was able to decipher stereotype, as well as use their films to combat these stereotypes and engage their viewers in new images by filmmakers like Julie Dash and Zeinabu Irene Davis who belong to the L.A. Rebellion school (Ogunleye, 2007).

Sound Track

Much like the popularly accepted beat-laden African music popularized elsewhere, the sound track of most African diaspora movies rely on the drum-bass, emotive and bodily rhythmic mix with the haunting chant-like vocals. African music as assimilated with other genre where they now currently thrive, has taken in various forms that has become globally acceptable, from soul, blues, rock, dance to hip hop. These kinds of music have been used in most films as accompaniment defining a diaspora not only in geographic terms but cultural as well.

African music is a vast and varied ethnic sound from various groups without distinct pan-African music, but with common forms sharing both traditional African and Middle Eastern features.

The music and dance forms include many Caribbean and Latin American music genres as derivation, such as rumba and salsa, as well as African American music. These are all rooted and founded on musical traditions from Africa brought by African slaves. Aside from voice, musical instruments developed to use various techniques such as melisma and yodel, African musical instruments include a wide array of drums, slit gongs, rattles, double bells as well as melodic instruments like string instruments of musical bows, different types of harps and harp-like instruments like the Kora as well as fiddles, types of xylophone and lamellophone such as the mbira and different types of wind instrument like flutes and trumpets. These all comprise music that accompany films

Drums is extensively used in African traditional music and instruments include tama talking drums, bougarabou and djembe in West Africa, water drums in Central and West Africa, and the different types of ngoma drums from Central and Southern Africa. Percussion instruments include many rattles and shakers, such as the kosika, rainstick, bells and woodsticks (Tracey, 1961).

Conclusion

African diaspora has, as earlier suggested, come to mean two different, and still related context of dispersal and scattering: a matter which is necessarily undesirable. Then, too, it meant the changes and development of the culture of a defined people, where assimilation and merger becomes inevitable where they find themselves in.

In cinema, diaspora is emphasized through the negative experiences of Africans throughout the process of assimilation, from painful, forced slavery depicting him as an object as well as goods to be traded, through the maintenance of their rooted values they were able to maintain as they adapt to a cruel society.

The African diaspora is rich of thematic and cultural drama that merits good as well as sublime film materials, as there is a continuing struggle to free a people from subjugation and limited perception by other skin colors. Diaspora remains a theme to be explored and as long as the African natives and their descendants remain as second to other skin colors, the film drama will continue moving its audiences as well as inspire its creation and depiction.

Reference

Encyclopedia Britannica (2007). Historical survey. The international slave trade. Slavery. Encyclopædia Britannica. Web.

Olson, Steve (2003). Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Dodson, Howard and Sylviane A. Diouf, eds. (2005). In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Mensah, John Freelove. Persons Granted British Citizenship United Kingdom, 2006. Home Office Statistical Bulletin. Web.

Warren, J. Benedict (1985). The Conquest of Michoacán. University of Oklahoma Press.

Meyer, Birgit (1999). “Popular Ghanaian Cinema and “African Heritage””. Africa Today – Volume 46, Number 2, pp. 93-114.

Ogunleye, Foluke (2007). “Transcending the “Dust”: African American Filmmakers Preserving the “Glimpse Of the Eternal””. College Literature – 34.1, pp. 156-173.

Francis, Terri (2005). “Embodied Fictions, Melancholy Migrations: Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Celebrity.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies – Volume 51, Number 4, pp. 824-845.

White, Jerry (2003). “Arguing with Ethnography: The Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault.” Cinema Journal – 42, Number 2, pp. 101-124.

Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), and Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

Ronald Segal (1995). The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 4. ISBN 0-374-11396-3. “It is now estimated that 11,863,000 slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. [Note in original: Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature,” in Journal of African History 30 (1989), p. 368.

Stephen Behrendt (1999). “Transatlantic Slave Trade”, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Gordon, Edmund T. and Mark Anderson (1999). “The African Diaspora: Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification.” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 112, No. 445, Theorizing the Hybrid, pp. 282-296.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. (2004). “Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 24, Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New/pp. 172-189.

Reid, Mark (1993). Redefining Black Film. University of California Press.

Lott, Tommy (1995). “Redefining Black Film. – book reviews.” African American Review, Spring.

Tracey, Hugh. (1961). The evolution of African music and its function in the present day. Johannesburg: Institute for the Study of Man in Africa.

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