Brent Hayes Edwards's The Uses of Diaspora Essay

Brent Hayes Edwards's The Uses of Diaspora - Essay Example This research tells that Edwards has referred to W.E.B. Du Bois and Karl Marx to create a perspective for forming his treatise. Edwards summarizes the ways in which the concept of duality of Du Bois and idea of capitalism of Karl Marx can provide a useful model of African-American Studies that harmonizes African-centred cultural issues with the certain political and economic necessities confronting Blacks in different parts of the world. Moreover, similar to Du Bois, Edwards tries to engross the discipline in a critical historical foundation, whether it is political science, cultural, sociological, or literary-focused while taking into account the large-scale impacts of racial-capitalism. Edwards seized the opportunity to show the debated feature of the national focus in African-American Studies. He tried to substantiate that there remains a lot of diversity and disparity among scholars of African-American Studies who use the United States as their main focus. Edwards’s defini tion provides credibility to political and cultural relations between the Diaspora and Africa. For instance, understood on its own terms, the Haitian Revolution shows the different ways the Black people acted in response to their places in the world. The article by Edwards, in relation to this, claims that the failure of migrants to assimilate completely into the nation and culture of Haiti permanently marked how several Black people view themselves with respect to Haitians. The ideas of emigrants of being an ‘African’ were thwarted together with the movement, since in Haiti they not merely faced religious, environmental, and economic problems, but a strange racial atmosphere as well. A number of African Americans started to express, specifically, a multifaceted diasporan awareness which embraces both cultural diversities and racial commonalities between Black peoples in the United States. By the advent of the period of antebellum, African Americans certainly regarded t hemselves as part of an African Diaspora. Basically, the argument of Edwards opens an opportunity for the understanding of the connection between the Diaspora and Africa that is rooted in historical experiences, collective intellectual past, political relations, and cultural ties, without the one dominating the others. Furthermore, Edwards’s argument, which relies on ‘basic interrelationships’ and the notion of the ‘African world’, implies continuously developing interconnections between the Diaspora and Africa that transcend a stagnant customary Africa, or a focus on Africa that is entirely founded on the Black experience.