Black whiteness, white blackness and the making of global African identities

Questions of racial and cultural identity have almost become endemic in current Africana, American, cultural and humanistic studies. So too have issues concerning subaltern resistance to, and/or determined self-integration into, dominant cultures. This study has been conceived as a contribution to the ongoing debates. Divided into five parts, its methodology is one of investigation-cum-exposition. This allows for the construction of narratives and analyses against the closure and close-mindedness of some prevailing paradigms.; Part One provides an interpretive exposition and application of Stuart Hall's notions of race as a floating signifier, and of identity as the product of the relationship between subjects and discursive practices. This allows me to examine conceptions of Black whiteness and white blackness in several African languages and in the cultures of Black communities in the diaspora.; Part Two is a critical engagement with Ali Mazrui's conception of a Global Africa (the continent plus the diasporas of the Middle Passage and colonialism) and its triple heritage of indigenous traditions, Islam and Western civilization. The discussion brings into purview the history of Black population groups in the Arab world. From this perspective, Part Three offers close readings of South African President Thabo Mbeki's cultural manifesto, African Renaissance, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentricity.; Part Four examines interpretations of cultural mimicry proffered by Homi Bhabha, Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul. The biographies and writings of Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano are discussed for the insights they provide into what I have called mimetic conformity and transgressive mimicry. These forms of cultural mimicry are contrasted to the vulgar mimesis of Black elites studied by E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie and lampooned by many others.; The Part Five explores the relationship between Western primitivization of the Global African world and the processes of Black identity formation. I argue that the strategies of indigenization and hybridization employed by Black societies and individuals in response to Western primitivism are not always oppositional.