James Sidbury took ten years to write this book, and it was well worth the time and effort. Becoming African in America is a fine and welcome addition to the literature on the history of the African diaspora and the black Atlantic world (which are not necessarily the same, conceptually or analytically). The work revolves around the question of the emergence of protonationalist identity as it pertains to the African-descended, with temporal borders stretching from the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the first thirty years of the nineteenth. As such, Sidbury is interested in those discursive practices that made significant and lasting contributions to a project by which African ‘affiliative’ identity came to be applied, and more importantly embraced more broadly than narrowly, and the means by which the transnational potential of that identity was hijacked and underwent diminution of status (as a consequence of US internal politics regarding domestic slavery). Stated differently, the author is after those processes by which an African identity came to be asserted by many, whether African- or American/European-born, during a period coterminous with the early American republic. Though the book is largely preoccupied with developments in North America, there is considerable discussion of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and to a lesser extent England.
The author's point is that the concept of being an ‘African’ was largely formulated in diaspora, that it was much more informed by a set of similar circumstances and experiences than by geography or biology, and that it was forged as both condition and solution to that condition; that is, becoming ‘African’ was as much a strategy as recognition. After a reference to the Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge's appropriation of African identity, Sidbury begins the analysis with a consideration of how early authors Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley took on African identity in an effort to combat the various canards and negative opinions about people from that continent. In so doing, both drew (ironically but unavoidably) upon decidedly Western notions of a pre-contact edenic Africa while evincing little interest in the actual inhabitants of Africa. In referring to themselves as Africans, therefore, they were ‘asserting outsider status’, so that the ‘African’ was actually a ‘new diasporic identity’.
Though it cannot be demonstrated that Wheatley and Sancho were necessarily read by the next wave of writers to be examined, Gronniosaw, Cugoano, Equiano, etc., are presented (and reasonably so) as the ideological heirs and sustainers of what Wheatley and Sancho began, and, as opposed to the promotion of an ‘affiliative picture of African unity’ by the latter two, the former group espoused a ‘literal kinship among “Africans”’ through a narrative of ‘mythic unity’ of African peoples. This mythic unity extended the view of Africa-as-paradise, while calling for the end of slaving and the creation of a new, Christianized Africa, all informed by the Exodus-inspired conviction that ‘blacks were special favorites of God’.
Just as the connection between successive generations of black writers is tenuous, so is evidence that the work of these writers was widely known among blacks. Even so, it is clear from looking at the record of black organizations in the period that many of African descent, lettered and non-lettered, also embraced an African identity, to the degree that emigrationist efforts were considerable. The author takes us through the many churches, masonic lodges and mutual aid societies that used the appellation ‘African’ as part of their official names. He creates an instructive and moving dialectic between events in the USA and England, especially as they cohered around the African Methodist Church and the movement of London's ‘Black Poor’ (in relation to Granville Sharp's activities), and the venture to Sierra Leone, with emphasis on the plight of the Loyalists. Perhaps the author is at his best in the nuanced treatment of Paul Cuffe, who emerges as someone who not only financed several voyages to West Africa (remarkable enough), but who, as an early architect of black nationalist designs and aspirations through trial-and-error, came to fashion an attenuated agenda that sought to link the Sierra Leone colony commercially to blacks in North America, and who would both eventually gain independence and form, in tandem, a ‘transatlantic African nation’. Sidbury concludes the work by examining developments in Liberia, having cited the rise of the American Colonization Society in 1816 and its connections to slaveholding interests as the principal cause for the loss of interest in emigrationist schemes among blacks.
If I absolutely had to quarrel with the author, it would be over minor issues. I am not sure, for example, that any tension between ‘ethnic’ identities and ‘African’ ones are necessarily debilitating or even problematic, as is suggested in the case of Olaudah Equiano. Nor am I convinced that appropriation of African identity proceeded from elite or privileged discourse (in relative terms); the extent to which writers and leaders were voicing rather than creating sentiment remains an open question. And given that so many other regions and cultures shared the Atlantic basin, including the African continent, I would think that additional consultations are needed before we can confidently state that the African identity is a diasporic creation. However, the possibility is provocative, such that the book, for this reason and many more, will serve as a generative source for further research and inquiry. There can be no greater tribute to a person's scholarship, nor any greater reward.
