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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 280 pp., $34.00 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-0226923048.
The Predicament of Blackness is a critically engaging work that effectively theorizes modern Africa back into the African Diaspora. Pierre conducts an ethnography of racialization that is a result of five years of field work in Accra and Cape Coast Ghana and archival work in Ghana and England. Ghana was strategically chosen due to its history of Pan-Africanism, slavery, and colonialism. It was also the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain political independence. With such a rich, interconnected, and complex history, Ghana can be found in the discourses of African, African Diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Pierrie also includes insights and experience from two decades of interactions in Ghana. She uses participation observation, interview questions, archival work, and secondary literature. Her findings also included informal observations and conversation when the “formal” anthropological hat was off. She demonstrates her analysis through the ways individuals, social groups, and the state construct, imagine, and transform racial projects in Ghana.
Pierre argues that the process of racialization was imported externally, yet remains relevant as it determines contemporary Black identities. Race becomes the overarching identity that situates successive identities such as gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. She posits that Africa, in particular Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, was created based on black and white binaries that position European empire-making as the process that constructed race and all its inequalities. Therefore, postcolonial Ghana becomes a racialized space anchored in the memory of slavery and in the legacy of colonialism where racism is a historical, political, economical, and social process. Pierre ruptures the epistemological and theoretical positions of the African Diaspora by highlighting how conventional notions of diaspora and racial formation are solely linked to slavery, which views Africa as marginalized, static, and peripheral. In marginalizing Africa, diasporic discourse failed to conceptualize the global racial formation of “Black” African experiences. Africa is usually viewed through “African cultural survivals,” leaving Africa in the past with no modern relevance or dismissed as essentialist. Additionally, Africanists and continentalists failed to frame Africa within a globalized process of racial formation and inequality. Africa’s narrative is focused on national, ethnic, and tribal conflict without considering how race constitutes these processes brought through colonization. Ultimately, race in contemporary Ghana is part of a global political economy that institutionalizes racial hierarchies through global white supremacy.
Each chapter convincingly reifies her efforts to address racial processes in modern Ghana (Africa). From the outset in chapter one, Pierre demonstrates that nativity, ethnicity, and tribe are racial constructs introduced during colonial rule. Blackness and Africanness are viewed through the lens of whiteness. She expresses that local dimensions of these processes have global implications through the “coloniality of race and power” (12). Colonial authorities strategically enforced indirect rule that creates a system of “Othering.” Its basis is in an apartheid framework that economically, politically, socially, and culturally segregates through racial binaries. In turn, ethnic differences are seen as natural rather than structurally and operationally enforced. Africans were constituted as Black in a global hierarchy of power and simultaneously localized in nativity, ethnicity, and “tradition.” Ironically, the institutionally constructed nativity will be the same forces used to fight colonial rule. In chapter two, she addresses how the structures of colonialism and racial formation were reconstructed or remained intact at independence. She depicts how racial projects were set in place to eliminate colonial existence. These dual projects included destabilizing indirect rule and obtaining independence through Pan-Africanism, which stemmed from racial and continental consciousness. According to Pierre, Pan-Africanism lacked effective solutions to solve the marginalization of Africa from global capitalism and ethnic fragmentation.
Pierre also interrogates the other side of racialization, whiteness and white positionality, in postcolonial Ghana in chapters three and four. Whiteness is defined as the processes that structure white power and privilege. She highlights that the perceptions of whiteness at the local level connect to global white supremacy. Pierre gives two types of white locals: Development and Peace Corps whites. Development whites became a symbol of western dominated capitalism while the Peace Corp whites see Africa as a constructed place for self-adventure. Both instances are viewed through the lens of white privilege. Continuing in the context of whiteness, Pierre contends that skin bleaching is based on whiteness and light skin desire, which marks a form of privilege. There is a global structure of race that connects race with color. Skin bleaching can be connected to European expansion into the new world, which is not exactly about becoming white. Rather, it is about becoming less black to gain societal advantages. The skin bleaching industry reinforces global notions of white hegemony displaying the continued pattern of western racism. Light skin can potentially increase wages and job opportunity. Lightness and mixed-race skin become modes of aspiration that acknowledge whiteness as power, status, and privilege through racialization.
Chapters five and six confront the meaning and negotiation of Ghana as a diasporic space through its investment in state-sponsored heritage tourism, which is constructed around slavery and the interaction of Blacks from the Americas with Ghanaians. Pierre uses this as a means to rearticulate race as not solely a diasporic condition but a historical and contemporary reality in Ghana, harnessed in Ghana’s racialized position globally. Her theoretical claims are solidified in chapter seven where she rigorously examines the importance of incorporating modern Ghana and Africa at large within diaspora studies by fusing two fields that tend to not engage in scholarly exchange: African Diaspora Studies and Africanist Anthropology. These fields are historically similar but epistemologically different, where the former “take[s] Africa for granted” while the latter “take[s] race for granted” (186). In turn, she asserts that both Black Africans on the continent and Blacks in the diaspora must be understood as part of a wider racial construct of “modern Blackness” (186). Pierre concludes with an epilogue that reaffirms the common thread throughout her book: Africa, specifically modern Ghana, cannot be understood outside of globalized racial structures that determines Ghana and Africa’s present condition.
This book transcends normative understandings of diaspora by revitalizing the dormant discourse of race in Africa (beyond Southern Africa). Pierre’s ability to transform the way the reader thinks about race and diaspora, theoretically and spatially, places this book as a must read in the field of African and African Diaspora Studies. There are also further considerations that were spurred from such a seminal work but not directly addressed in this book. For instance, how could an alternative analysis of whiteness such as through clothes, western education, language, accent, and/or hair on the Black African body affirm and/or change Pierre’s argument? Additionally, is diaspora as an episteme limiting in understanding race in Africa? How could alternative terminology better situate all Black people in a global political economy of race? To this end, The Predicament of Blackness conveys a unique duality by introducing a much needed reconceptualization of race and diaspora while also giving the readers a more critical lens to question these processes for themselves.
