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Books by Manthia
Diawara
Black-American Cinema /
African Cinema /
We Won't Budge
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We Won't
Budge
An African Exile in the World
By Manthia Diawara
Preface
The idea for this book came from a deep
frustration I felt on the death of Amadou Diallo, who was
violently killed by New York City police. he was on his way back
to his apartment, after a long day's labor, when they gunned him
down.
I was saddened and angry because I felt that
his short life in America mirrored my own beginning here, and
that his American dream was betrayed by a violent and senseless
killing. My frustration came partly from the fact that there are
still no opportunities for young people like Amadou Diallo in
their home countries in Africa. Not much has changed since 1974,
when I, myself, had left Bamako, Mali--with other young people
of my generation--to go to Europe and America. Still, today, the
youth are fighting to get out of Africa, to run away from abject
poverty, unemployment, civil and tribal wars, religious
persecution, corruption, and government oppression. Another part
of my profound disappointment with the world stemmed from a
realization that Amadou Diallo was shot in new York because he
was a black man. if he were white, he would still be alive
today. He was killed because he fit a biased description, a
racial profiling.
Amadou Diallo's death left a sour taste in my
mouth. Just as my success story in America could have been his,
the tragedy that had befallen him could be mine, as a black man
in America`--albeit an African. I remember writing an editorial
about that which no newspaper wanted to publish. It went as
follows:
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Homeboy
Cosmopolitan
Amadou Diallo was a "homeboy
cosmopolitan," dressed in his down jacket, baseball
cap, and tennis shoes. He hustled videos outside of a
storefron in Manhattan and counted his money at the end
of the day, with his mind full of every immigrant's
dream of making it in this land of unlimited
opportunities. Culturally, Amadou Diallo, not unlike
most immigrants to this country, was different from
African Americans, and perhaps even prejudiced against
them. But Amadou Diallo was also a black man, and that
visual sign is enough to get an African or Caribbean
mistaken for an African American in the streets of New
York.
Amadou Diallo's generation of
Francophone Africans has just discovered America. In the
1960s and 1970s, it was radical for those of my
generation from the former French colonies of Cote
d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, and Senegal to use America as a
dream space for emigration. We dreamed of going to
France--the land of Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity--in order to rise above what we considered
our miserable condition in Africa. We hoped to prove
ourselves there, and to participate in the universal
humanism as it was promulgated by the République. But
as soon as our member grew large, the National Front and
other racists raised their ugly heads against
immigration and homeboy cosmopolitanism as threats to
public safety and as a danger to French culture.
Amadou Diallo's generation turned to
America because of its new image as the winner of the
cold war and as the champion of globalization and
democratization. The gains of the Civil Rights movement
also opened the doors to many more Africans and
Caribbeans, even, if these groups do not always live in
solidarity with their indigenous counterparts. Amadou
Diallo's generation arrived in America, full of hope and
life and dressed like homeboys. They took advantage of
the space created by the civil rights struggles and
America's superficial consumption of African-American
popular culture. They rented apartments in black
communities in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. But,
like most immigrants, they lived separately in their own
cultures.
Little do the Amadou Diallos of the
world know that the black man in America bears the curse
of Cain, and that in America they, too, are considered
black men, not Fulanis, Mandingos, or Wolofs. In
America, no taxi will stop to pick them up; putting a
price on their heads elects politicians; and the police
will hunt them down.
They cut Amadou Diallo down like a
black American, even though he belonged to the Fulani
tribe in his native Guinea. There is a lesson here for
all of us to learn. The tragedies of Abner Louima (a
Haitian-American brutally raped by members of the New
York Police Department) and Amadou Diallo--two
immigrants submitted to the ritualistic white violence
generally reserved for African Americans--should finally
suffice as a political awakening for Africans and
Caribbeans to the issues of race in America.
Ironically, the killing of Amadou
Diallo has elevated him to the level of a martyr whose
initial identification with homeboys, and subsequent
ritualistic execution by the police, should serve
primarily as another landmark of injustice for African
Americans. it is only when new immigrants of African
descent, and immigrants from Asia and Europe, realize
that their opportunities are linked to the oppression of
African Americans that the sacrifice of Amadou Diallo,
this homeboy cosmopolitan, will influence the
improvement of race relations in America. |
But
We Won't Budge is not about the
death of Amadou Diallo, even if there are parallels between his
life and the stories I tell here. The book is about the
developed world--that is, the former colonizers of the African
continent--that is now closing its doors to Africans and Arabs;
it is about human rights violations and racism against people of
color. I am sadder than I have ever been before because the more
they say the world is globalized, the more they marginalized
Africans and endanger our lives. As the Western media
monopolizes control of the communication channels, our voices
are unheard in Europe, America, and even in Africa. I am now
unhappy wherever I go in the world. I cannot stand the
stereotypes Europeans have of Americans or Africans, and vice
versa. I cannot discuss Israel with Europeans, or Palestine with
Americans. how did the world decide that we Africans have
nothing meaningful to say about these important issues facing
us: democracy and human rights Lest our oppressors forget, we
Africans have eyes to see, ears to hear, heads to analyze, and
mouths to judge. And this book shows the way one African sees
the world.
In
We Won't Budge, I want to
give a human face to African immigration in today's global
world. As I describe the reasons that lead many Africans to
leave the continent--poverty, persecution, and lack of
opportunities--I try to make visible their predicament in Europe
and America, where they are caught between tradition and
modernity, and hindered by their attachment to the past and the
resurgence of racism and police brutality against them in the
countries of immigration.
Bedridden with malaria, I take the reader
back to the town when i first emigrated to Paris and then to
Washington, D.C. Some of the stories I tell here come straight
out of the hallucinations caused by the malaria fever--which is
capable of making one who suffers from it feel a pain as acute
as a racist insult. I can best characterize the other stories in
the book as romantic memoirs which are laced with rock &
roll nostalgia, the freedom generated by African independencies,
and the euphoria of the Civil Rights movement in Washington,
D.C.
I begin with my own stories of immigration
and the experiences of my friends and relatives to show how
recent immigrations have brought race relations to the forefront
in Europe and how the American dream has become the primary lure
for Africans who are locked out of the old continent. But one
also wonders, with the Amadou Diallo shooting, if racism and
xenophobia do not constitute the main obstacle to the
integration and assimilation of immigrants and their attempt to
achieve the American dream.
My memories are interlaced with immigrant
experiences in the present. I go back and forth, moving between
my immigration in the 1970s during the cold war and nowadays
with globalization, the clash of civilizations, and immigration
as a security issue not only in France and other European
countries, but also in the United States. By making the past
speak to the present in this manner and using literary
techniques to write the history of African immigrations, I hope
to go beyond anthropology and sociology, while continuing the
discussion with these academic disciplines. I call my approach
reverse anthropology, or neo-anthropology, or simply cultural
studies. That is, I study African immigrants in Europe and
America by using, whenever appropriate, the tools of
anthropology, sociology, literature, memoirs, the epistolary
form, and travel narratives.
My depiction, in the present tense, of the
conditions in which my friends and relatives live in Paris today
is intended to reveal the new divisions in French society. The
African ghettoes are a sober reminder of how France is becoming
like America--a society divided between black and white, rich
and poor, and European and others. As I travel between
continents, I see myself and people like me singled out at
airports because of our national origins and the color of our
skin. Despite all the education I have received in America, the
fat professor's salary, and all the titles, I wonder if I have
become the cosmopolitan individual of my dreams, or if I am
still trapped in a racial or ethnic group.
We Won't Budge is a literary tribute
to a song, "Nous Pas Bouger," by the Malian singer
Salif Keita. he sang it in defense against the exclusion and the
human rights violations of Africans in the global world. I
intend my book to continue the dissemination of Salif Keita's
ideas and to contribute to making the lives of African
immigrants better. It is a book about Africans in Europe and how
their presence influences European politics. It is also a
comparative study of two social systems: race relations in
America and France; identity politics and communitarianism on
the one hand, and individualism and universal rights on the
other. I hope, therefore, that the book will provide a more
complex and nuanced take on globalization.
The most recent books related to my
subjects--i.e., integration, globalization, the politics of
recognition, unemployment and racism--that inspired me include Les
misères du monde (The Weight of the World) by Pierre
Bourdieu et al., and Tahar ben Jelloun's Le racisme expliqué
à ma fille (Racism Explained to My Daughter).
While Ben Jelloun's book is about racism against North Africans
in France, Bourdieu and his colleagues address the issues of
class and the dislocation of the welfare system in France. Paul
Stoller, an American scholar, also has published a fascinating
book entitled Money Has No Smell, about West African
immigrants in North America. It is an ethnographic study of
African vendors in places like New York and Atlanta. I hope that
We Won't Budge will add more fuel to the findings in these
books, and that it will contribute to the betterment of the
conditions of immigrants everywhere in the world
posted 4 November 2007
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Manthia Diawara is presently chair of
the Africana Studies Department at New York University. A native
of Mali, Professor Diawara received his education in France and
later traveled to the United States for his university studies.
Diawara received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1985. His
dissertation, on the politics and aesthetics of African cinema,
formed the basis for African Cinema, published in 1985 by
Indiana University Press.
Since then, Dr. Diawara has edited the volume
Black-American Cinema, published by Routledge in 1993 in addition to
publishing widely in journals. He has taught at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania.
Diawara is engaged in Black cultural
studies, a project begun in Britain in the early '80s by figures
such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. He is interested,
however, in the material conditions of Black people in the
Americas in order not to replicate the British formulations.
His essay "Black Studies / Cultural
Studies: Performative Acts" in AfterImage explains his
view of black cultural studies and the direction they should take.
His bibliography
should be checked for other essays on the topic. Diawara's views
on "Blackness" place him among the "strategic
essentialists," which include such thinkers as Greg Tate,
Arthur Jafa, Tricia Rose, Paul Gilroy, Houston Baker, and others
-- all of whom privilege Blackness "without recourse to
narrower, pathological, and biological notions of cultural purity.
Diawara has published widely on the topic of
film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara
also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the
documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema,
and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.
He is also the author of
Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and
Spectatorship (1993),
African Cinema: Politics and Culture
(1992), and
In Search of Africa
(1998). manthia.diawara@nyu.edu * *
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African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics
By Manthia
Diawara
In this book
Manthia Diawara, a renowned scholar on Black cinema,
literature, and art brings readers up to date on the
exciting changes taking place behind and in front of
African cameras. Contributions by filmmakers,
scholars, and producers as well as profiles of
thirty important African directors and their films,
provide valuable insight into recent developments.
The volume comes with a DVD containing several
interviews with filmmakers conducted by the author.
Scholars, students, and anyone interested in
cinematic and African cultural studies will find
much to discover and celebrate in this
authoritative, fascinating look at new trends in
African filmmaking. |
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In Search of Africa
By Manthia
Diawara
Manthia Diawara
is able to see Guinea with a nostalgia that doesn't
turn a blind eye to the nation's faults, pointing
out what needs to be done without falling prey to
"Afro-pessimism." In one heartfelt passage,
recalling his upbringing in revolutionary Guinea,
Diawara writes: "My life began when the new nations
were born, in the late 1950s. We had been full of
hope then, determined to change Africa, to catch up
quickly with the modern world, to show that black
people could use their culture and civilization, as
other people did, to lead them into modernity." But,
as Diawara relates throughout the book, that didn't
happen. He painfully recounts how he and his family
were forced to leave Guinea and how the country sank
into a Marxist-oriented dictatorial nightmare. |
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While not overlooking the
horrible historical impact of the slave trade and European
colonialism, Diawara also blames internal corruption and
dangerous African ethnic customs, like female genital
mutilation, for his country's underdevelopment. Ultimately,
however, he remains confident that this people will one day
ascend to their full political, economic, and cultural
potential: "Our desire to be modernized has been awakened, and
it cannot be denied. Women want liberation from traditional
oppression; we all want access to education and material wealth;
and we are tired of being ignored by the world."—Amazon
Review
update 20 December 2010 |
