From a Jamaican studying in Trinidad and Tobago
Sparked from the work of
Herskovits in general, and the tribute article of Sidney Mintz in particular (Mintz 1964) I was intrigued by
ethnicity and it’s resulting impact on identity - even as I am forming daily my
opinions, insights and identity as a young adult. In the article, Mintz
discusses seminal works on black identity in the aftermath of the upheaval and
exploitation of slavery and Herskovits’s work put up for discussion among names
such as Dubois, Johnson, as the thinker who came to stir up the debate which
had seemed all but totally shelved by American and the English Caribbean as an
issue still present and influential in the dynamics of society.
A lot of activists within the
realm of racial and ethnic divisions and equality claim influence by the works
of Herskovits and his presentation of the retentions and innovations of culture
and practices that were taken with the enslaved blacks to the new world.
Startling to me however, were those who questioned the right of Herskovits, a
Jew settled in America, to be presenting the African presence to these the
descendants and inheritors of the legacy, and how it is that it took ‘him’ in
order for the subject matter to have gained prominence and validity in
“mainstream Academia.” It is a view which later had affected students under him (PBS.org 2010) . Reading and
watching these actions and the sentiments/ reactions of those affected interest
me as a student of the social sciences, but they resonate with me in many ways
because of the society within which I exist and am shaped.
Key to my understanding (or lack
thereof) of the reactions of those onlookers and students who were ascribed
status as the inheritors of the displaced Africans was my own experience here
in the Caribbean. To be black in my country is to be the ethnic majority; it
means seeing myself, and any manifestation of a life choice I may make reflected
in society. I see myself as my nation’s leader, the holder of high offices, and
the trained professional, even as I see myself as the delinquent and the
disciplinarian. And yet, it was through looking at the response to their
identity from the lens of black as minority that I became open to perceiving
class struggles and conflict through a new lens. And yet, Herskovits did not
seek to present the “…Political position of these peoples” (Mintz 1964) .
The Myth of the Negro Past was to present a challenge to the notion that the
displaced peoples had no past – that they had carried little with them from the
continent of origin and what they carried was lost to the deculturization
process that was chattel slavery. His work highlighted the resilience of
culture and cultural practices, and their rebirth and relevance to subsequent
generations.
It is interesting to note that
the widely held belief in American Sociological thought may have been that the
displaced Africans did not come with any culture, when in my own country there
are laws (some of which, like the 1898 Obeah law, are still on the books) that
were specifically created as a response to culture’s pervasive and versatile
nature.
This was no really “new”
phenomena in my home country, indeed we were taught about the suppression of
culture as well as race based oppression and dehumanisation, but I think a lot
of us failed to grasp what it meant.
And even as I read the article and did my own research on sentiments/ reactions
to both the work of (and reception of) Herskovits on Africana (that word in
itself causes me some disquiet though I have not yet unboxed why), I am
grateful and arrested that this man sought to legitimise his standing in
academia through his presentation of ethno-cultural realities and retentions of
a race that was not his own. How does one begin to address this feeling?
Nevertheless, the term I leave
this article having been moved by is Africanisms,
which I understand to mean those elements of language, attitudes, modes of
expression – those components of a cultural identity – which are deemed to be
African in origin.
Works Cited
Mintz, Sidney.
1964. "Melville J Herskovitz and Caribbean Studies: A retrospective
tribute." Caribbean Studies, vol. 4, No 2 4 (2): 42 - 51.
PBS.org. 2010. Independent
Lens: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. January. Accessed September
25, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8m8VSdKRu4.
