Challenging a Pan-African Identity: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips

Abstract

In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

Pan-Africanism: A Quest for Liberation and the Pursuit of a United Africa

“…Women, to a great extent, became the mothers of the revolution, of the struggle for the liberation of Africa and its people. The conditions of Black people in one part of the world could not be seen as different from other parts of the world, for there was a kinship by virtue of racial experiences (Smithers 2011). In many ways, Africa gave Blacks from the diaspora a sense of home, belonging, and family.…”

Pan-Africanism: A Quest for Liberation and the Pursuit of a United Africa

“…Women, to a great extent, became the mothers of the revolution, of the struggle for the liberation of Africa and its people. The conditions of Black people in one part of the world could not be seen as different from other parts of the world, for there was a kinship by virtue of racial experiences (Smithers, 2011). In many ways, Africa gave Blacks from the diaspora a sense of home, of belonging, of family.…”

Africa and Afrocentric Historicism: A Critique

“…As some critics contend, "At the general and specific levels of African Diaspora formation, there is variation by geographical location, by generations, by material and institutional conditions, and by socio-economic and demographic patterns" (Hamilton, Simmons, Familusi, & Hanson, 2007: p. 8). In fact, more recent studies of the global black experience underscore the imperative of transcending both the traditional Diaspora and Black Atlantic frames, and the homogeneity-heterogeneity discourse (Smithers, 2011). The shift is towards acknowledging expansive and complex terrains of the human experience, as well as undertaking microanalytical studies of new forms of Diasporas within and without Africa; Diasporas that grew out of what Manger and Assal describe as "the decay in the contemporary African post-colonial state" (Manger & Assal, 2006: p. 10).…”