The African Immigrant Experience
Wanjala Nasong'o, Rhodes College
Imali Abala, Ohio Dominican University
Kefa Otiso, Bowling Green State University
BACKGROUND
The history of race and ethnicity in the United States has been characterized by tension, rivalry, conflict, and violence since the arrival of English Pilgrims in November 1620. The English arrived at Cape Cod, not as immigrants entering a foreign society that would need to acquire a new national identity, but as a colonial vanguard keen on recreating a New England in the image of the one they had left behind. From the beginning, they were the predominant ethnic group. They enjoyed a political and cultural hegemony over the life of the American nation-in-the-making. The non-English populations that followed, namely, the Dutch, the French, the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Polish, and the Russians, were regarded as aliens forced to adapt to English rule in terms of both politics and culture. The establishment of English as the American lingua franca was thus a critical first step in the gradual assimilation of the multiple ethno-racial groups of the colonial era in the American nationalist project (Kauffman 2000, Marx 1996, Nasong'o 2019, 2008).
These non-English immigrants were a major source of labor originally imported to populate the American landmass, and later to provide cheap labor for plantation agriculture and industrial development as indentured laborers who were both scarce and expensive. Moreover, as contract laborers, indentured servants could bargain for acceptable terms and eventually entered the ranks of free labor once their contracts expired. This is the genesis of American slavery as the second source of ethnic pluralism in the United States with the forced importation of more than half a million Africans. The system of chattel slavery was more expedient and more profitable for southern plantation owners and their northern financiers. Whereas the indentured servant from Europe expected land at the end of his contract, the African slaves – who were conspicuous by their skin color and ignorant of the white man's ways – could be kept permanently in servitude, divorced from the land they worked. Racial differences were utilized to rationalize slavery and to exact resignation and complete mechanical obedience akin to a plough-ox or cart-horse (Steinberg 1989, Waters 1990).
For their part, the Native Americans, the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, were systematically uprooted, decimated, and banished to reservation wastelands. The Mexicans in the southwest were conquered and their land annexed by an expansionist nation under the rationale of "manifest destiny." The warfare against the American Indians, which included broken treaties, expropriation of their land, rebellion and ultimate defeat, was based on the stereotype of Indians as nomadic hunters and "uncivilized savages". As one early seventeenth-century document put it: "Savages have no particular propertie in any part or parcell of that country, but only a general residencie there, as wild beasts have in the forests." Their land was thus taken and they were herded to reservations, where they still remain, crippled with poverty, hunger, disease, and wanton neglect. If the American Indian was the nation's first minority, the future did not bode well for many other minorities that were to follow (Guss 2000, Omi and Winant 1994).
In spite of America's brutal and convoluted history, the American nationalist myth constructs the United States as a deep comradeship of middle-class society – as a land of liberty and opportunity; a shining city on a hill; a beacon of hope for the oppressed as pronounced in Emma Lazarus' poem "The Colossus" engraved on a plaque mounted at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Sentiments echoed in this poem characterize America as a land of the free and home of the brave. Seymour Martin Lipset (1990), a foremost American nationalist scholar, argues that whereas, for instance, British, Canadian, French, and German societies are rooted in a history of nationality related to community as a basis of their legitimacy, American society is defined by ideology. Being an American, Lipset argues, is an ideological commitment rather than a matter of birth, race, or national origin.
It is this nationalist construction of the U.S., as a land of liberty and opportunity and a welcoming melting pot of multiculturalism, which serves as a magnet for immigrants, including new arrivals from the continent of Africa. Such immigrants arrive on American shores and at ports of entry eager to join the pursuit of the clichéd American dream. Accordingly, African immigrants, a segment of the US foreign-born population, has grown rapidly since the 1980s even as the larger foreign-born Black population in the US has increased from below one million in 1980 to 4.2 million by 2016; with slightly over two million of these being from sub-Saharan Africa. Among the top African sources of these black immigrants in the US are Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Somalia, in that order (Echeverria-Estrada and Batalova 2019). One positive aspect of immigrants from Africa, according to the Pew Research Center, is that they are more likely than Americans overall to have a college degree or higher (Anderson and Lõpez 2018). Does this mean that African immigrants' experience in the US is largely positive? Have they succeeded in attaining their American dream? In the face of the dynamics spawned by the Black Lives Matter movement as a consequence of centuries of systemic racist violence against minorities in the US, how does this square with African immigrants? To what extent have they been victims of systemic racism and violence? What, in a nutshell, has been the experience of African immigrants in the US, socially, politically, and economically?
OBJECTIVE
This proposed book aims to address the above questions with a view to exploring, examining, and documenting the lived experiences of African immigrants in the US vis-à-vis the problematics of race, ethnicity, and violence. Among the themes to be covered include the following:
1. Race, Ethnicity, and the Black Peopling of the United States
2. Structural Violence against Blacks and the Making of the United States
3. African Immigrants and the American Dream
4. Educational and Career Trajectories of African Immigrants
5. African Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy
6. African Immigrant Home Ownership and Settlement Patterns
7. African Immigrant Spirituality
8. African Immigrant Politics
9. Policing and African Immigrant Communities
10. Crime, Justice, and African Immigrants
11. Gender and Violence among African Immigrant Communities
12. Youth Delinquency among African Immigrants
13. The Case of Undocumented African Immigrants
14. Made in Heaven or Hell? African Immigrant Marriages
15. Return Migration Among African Immigrants
16. African Immigrant Health Issues
17. African Immigrant Response to the George Floyd Murder
18. African Immigrant and African American and White American Relations
19. Broken Dreams: African Immigrant Homelessness and Vagrancy
20. Raising African Immigrant Children
21. Caring for elderly African immigrants
22. Single parenthood among African immigrants
CALL FOR CHAPTER ABSTRACTS
We invite 250-word chapter abstracts on the above and related themes from interested scholars by November 15, 2020. Abstracts should be sent as word attachments to: nasabaoti@gmail.com. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be expected to submit complete book chapters by May 15, 2021. The manuscript is expected to be submitted to the publisher by December 31, 2021. The project timeline details are as follows:
· November 15, 2020: Deadline for submission of chapter abstracts
· December 15, 2020: Notification of abstract acceptance
· May 15, 2021: Submission of draft chapters
· August 15, 2021: Submission of revised chapters
· December 31, 2021: Submission of manuscript to publisher
Send 250-word chapter abstracts to nasabaoti@gmail.com no later than November 15, 2020.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Monica and Gustavo Lõpez. "Key Facts about Black Immigrants in the U.S." Pew Research
Center, January 24, 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/24/key-facts-about-black-immigrants-in-the-u-s/
Echeverria-Estrada, Carlos and Jeanne Batalova. "Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the United States,"
Migration Policy Institute, November 6, 2019: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/sub-saharan-african-immigrants-united-states-2018.
Guss, David M.. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000.
Lazarus, Emma. "The New Colossus." Poetry Foundation, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus | Poetry Foundation.
Lipset, Martin S. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Kaufmann, Eric. "Ethnic or Civic Nation? Theorizing the American Case." Canadian Review of Studies in
Nationalism, 27, 2000: 133-154.
Marx, Anthony W. 1996. "Race-Making and the Nation-State," World Politics, 48(2), pp. 180-208.
Nasong'o, S. Wanjala. "Donald Trump: The Most Un-American President," The Elephant. January 31,
2019.
Nasong'o, S. Wanjala. "Nationalist Myth-Making, Cultural Identity and Nation Building: African Minorities
in the U.S. and Latin America," in Toyin Falola and Niyi Afolabi, eds. African Minorities in the New
World, New York: Routledge, 2008: 23-50.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Steinberg, Stephen. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Waters, Mary. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.--
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