Mullins, Paul R FORUM-Escavating America's Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindicationist Archaeologies

• Over more than a century, African diasporan scholars have idenified identity in complex forms that aspire to resist racial essentialism yet stake consequential political claims to collective roots
• Historical archaeology has painted a rich picture of the material details of African American life that also refutes black essentialism; however, archaeologists have crafted many utterly fluid African diasporan identitities that sometimes fail to examine the global connections, antiracist citizen rights, and concrete cultural heritage long examined by diasporan scholars
• In the 1950s Richard Wright proclaimed, "the Negro is America's metaphor," arguing that African American heritage was American history told in its most "vivid and bloody terms."
• Despite such challenges, African diasporan archaeology has explored some of the most meaningful dimensions of American life and archaeology's disciplinary sociopolitics
• The politics of diasporan archaeolog are significantly influenced by how archaeologists define diasporan identity 
• These are complicated challenges, but different constructions of diasporan identity can yield quite different political effects
• Since the 19th century, African American scholars have wrestled with how to define diasporan identity in a politically self-conscious form that acknowledges some shared basis for collective identity while resisting racist essentialism 
• W.E.B. Du Bois spent much of his rich intellectual career examining the complicated connections within the diasporan world 
• A vast volume of the pioneering diaspora history was a consciously "vindicationist" scholarship meant to counter racist historical narratives
• Vindicationist histories charted many political paths, but most wielded the authoritative voice of scholarshp to outline various forms of diasporan solidarity rooted in African heritage, antiracist resistance, enslavement, or some combination of those processes
• Some African historiography in this vein was overwhelmingly focused on demonstrating diasporan people's contributions to American society as a mechanism to secure citizenship without necessarily dispelling the racialized foundation for American citizen claims
• Reddick aspired to fashion a history that confronted both the broad social structures of globalization and everyday life, concluding, "if Negro history is to escape the provincial nature of its first phases, it will surely re-define the area of subject matter in terms of a larger focus
• Archaeologists often have obliquely critiqued deep-seated racist stereotypes
• Most African American archaeology positions itself against a more ambiguous backdrop, aspiring to develop a richer empirical picture of African American life, not one that consciously counters dominant narratives or takes either racialization or racist stereotypes as its targets
• Simply recognizing history as racist or dispelling stereotypes is not an end in itself
• Terrence Epperson argues that there is a pervasive archaeological reluctance to embrace such scholarship because it cuts to to the very heart of American color privilege and is grounded in stakeholder's distinctive political positioning 
• Historical archaeologists often have championed agency to counter the dehumanizing potential of empirical analysis, structuring processes, or identity totalities that imply passivity 
• African American scholars have often focused on similar issues in terms of consicousness within and against racialization 
• Historic archaeology's turn to agency often wrestles with the tension between, on the one hand, individuality and highly localized social circles and, on the other hand, broader collective identity, forcing analysts to assess the degree to which people live within and against collective ascribed identity categories 
• There are complicated effects to forging a European sense of individuality that does not confront the relationship between race and agency or the power of racial consciousness among diasporan peoples 
• Many of the archaeologists who are rethinking diasporan identity have taken aim on ethnicity in hopes of charting an anti-essentialist identity 
• Thinkers like Baldwin, Wright, and Du Bois all confronted racialization and did not disconnect it from diasporan consciousness. They situated various forms of agency and individuality in a direct relationship with racism
• Studies of cultural transformation have long been a staple of archaeological scholarship, but diasporan contexts present especially radical displacement, sociocultural complexity, and lines of power that are collectively complicated by their reach into contemporary social life and dominant scholarly representations 
• Charles Orser views all of these definitions of creolization warily, suggesting that creolization is normally reduced to defining newly circumscribed identity collectives
• The cases of Chesapeake pipes and colonoware are among the best examples of such identity debates over cultural mixing and transformation in African American scholarship 
• Mouer and collagues demolish African precedent and position diasporan identity within a broadly defined creolized experience. 
• This perspective borrows from Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, who invest the essential formative dimensions of African American life in experiences following the Middle Passage and reject facile connections between Africa and the New World 
• Diasporan scholars have always considered some sense of "Africa" to be central to diasporan identity, which must have a material form, and this scholarship cannot be summarily dismissed because of politics or source materials
• Many archaeologists carefully assess untroubled fabrications of African (or creoloized) identity and are cautious about the concrete ways in which material culture demonstrates historical persistence and discontinuities
• Some archaeologists see African influences (if not concrete precedents) embedded in a vast range of social and material practices, for instance, draw on a scholarship of conjuration and hoodoo that borrows heavily from the WPA narratives and usually points to precolonial Kongolese cosmologies
• Timothy Ruppel and colleagues argue similarly that seemingly commonplace spaces such as gardens were "encoded with resonant meanings that disputed notions of dependence, subservience, and inferiority" in what the researchers label a "diasporic transcript" that was "hidden in plain view."
• The recognition of ongoing identity transformations is very much in keeping with many diasporan definitions that focus on continual hybridity 
• In his introduction to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Black Metropolis, Wright argues that whites had failed to confront their uneasiness with racial domination, suggesting that "they feel the essential loneliness of their position which is built upon greed, exploitation, and a general denial of humanity; they feel the naked untenability of their split consciounsess, their two-faced moral theorites spun to justify their right to dominate
• There has not been an especially critical analysis of how and why archaeologists invoke diasporan identity, particularly the implications of scholarship conduced along and across the color line that is serving a wide range of political goals
• Many scholars have questioned how a plural diasporan history should be related when it is theorized by those who privilege from racial domination 
• Unless an engaged archaeology articulates repressed or ignored political demands, it simply paints evocative emotional pictures of the past with no connection to inequality 
• When Wright declared that "the Negro is America's metaphor," he argued that diasporan heritage constructed in discourses like historical archaeology could classify American racialization, white privilege, and the myriad inequalities race makes possible 
• Diasporan archaeology seems well positioned to weave an exceptionally complicated narrative of life along and across the color line that challenges racialized presumptions and fleshes out the genuine roots of diasporan heritage, even as it examines the complicated transfigurations of that heritage