The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification

This chapter begins by asking to consider how resistance itself is to be understood. It looks specifically at the positions of the nation-state, and the idea of nationality in accounts of black resistance and black culture, particularly music. The chapter utilizes a brief discussion of black music to ask implicit questions about the tendencies towards ethnocentrism and ethnic absolutism of black cultural theory. The critical political project forged in the journey from slave ship to citizenship is in danger of being wrecked by the seemingly insoluble conflict between two distinct but currently symbiotic perspectives which can be loosely identified as the essentialist and the pluralist standpoints. The very least that this music and its history can offer today is an analogy for comprehending the lines of affiliation and association which take the idea of the diaspora beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of an imputed racial essence.