USA/Africa Dialogue, No 664: A troubled diaspora VI

Dr Ogbu Kalu makes a very significant contribution but I don't think the answer lies in a rehash of some remote form of black internationalism, limited to academe and choreographed memory-bearing returns to the nativeland by Obi Nwakanma's conclave of intellectuals. At any rate, such polemical return narratives have never really stopped: Henry Louis Gates? Alice Walker? Kamau Braithwaite worked for a long time in Ghana, Caryl Philips visits the continent. There is a false alarm in claiming the contrary. The challenge lies in how to make the continent 'mean' and 'signify' beyond the hallowed halls of academe and the 'up there' world of intellectuals. How do you work towards a renewed consciousness of the continent in southside Chicago or in the projects of staten island? Every summer, mass-appeal African American artists (Micheal Jackson in the 80s when he was still a black man, 50 Cents, Usher, Nelly, etc)troop to Lagos and Port Harcourt, holding sellout concerts. Nigerian newspapers are usually awash with stories of such performances. Complete press blackout here. In some of my black cultural studies undergraduate classes, African American students are always completely shocked to discover that their favorite artists do go to Africa to perform annually! How do you plug into such mass-appeal processes, creating structures that would encourage these artists to develop a sense of responsibility in terms of validating and disseminating their experiences of the continent to their vast black followership when they return to the US? An Usher weaving a sense of continental reconnection into his lyrics, talking about his trips to Nigeria in his numerous interviews - I've never heard him mention a trip to Africa - would achieve a lot more than cocooned return narratives that are merely going to be processed as new material for the postcolonial identity machine of academe: more materials for Bhabharian hybridity, etc. Although the "we" that has failed to answer Countee Cullen's soul-searching question is not exactly clear, one may essay a suggestion that Abioseh Nicol did answer the question in "The Meaning of Africa"