Ambiguous Terms & Their Implications

Of the assigned readings this week, Gilroy’s excerpt, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity” left me asking the most questions. Although there are a variety of concepts I would like to discuss, I will focus my post on the term African-American and its connection to ethnicity, diaspora, and nationalism. Before I begin, I want to list a few definitions from the Merriam-Webster site.

African-American: an American of African and especially of black African descent

Diaspora: the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland

Ethnic: of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background

After reading Gilroy’s excerpt, the term African-American really struck me. I want to say it took on a whole different meaning but it actually did the opposite; it brought to light the plethora of meanings I had already associated with the term but had never really thought about. I have been trying to formulate my thoughts, but even as I continually revise, they become more difficult to logically and coherently explain – please bear with me!

As a self-proclaimed multicultural nation, I understand there are people living in Canada who have “descended” from other countries around the world (in fact, technically all of us have). Though these people sometimes describe themselves with hyphenated terms that signal what their family background is, such as “Irish-Canadian”, we do not associate these terms with race; these terms simply indicate origin – where someone came from.

However, when I think of the term African-American, and I do not believe I am the only person to whom this assumption applies, the first definition that enters my mind is colour – not someone from African descent. I tried to think of other terms (i.e. Irish-Canadian) that also had a double meaning of origin and race, but could not think of any as readily as I thought of African-American (and even then, it was not origin that first related itself in my mind to the term, rather race).

After wrestling with this conundrum, I decided to look up the definition of “African-American” online. It was fascinating that within the simple ten-word definition, the colour black was explicitly stated. Moreover, no other abbreviated term relating to origin made an overt reference to skin colour. I still do not know how to interpret this…

Additionally, the terms diaspora and ethnicity revealed interesting definitions (as listed earlier) as well. It was particularly interesting to note the synonyms for ethnicity, which include nationality and race, support Gilroy’s assertion of the symbiotic relationship between nationalism and ethnicity.

To process all of this, I had to create a mind map, which took me from African-American as having a double meaning of origin and race, to diaspora meaning a group of people moving from their homeland, to ethnicity meaning a group of related people, to nationalism and its relation to ethnicity. After trying to tie everything together, I came up with this question: if an ethnic diaspora of African-Americans crossed borders and settled into a new nation, then how can a multicultural nation like Canada have any sense/definition of nationalism if it is simply comprised of multiple diasporas that simply coexist and do not share much in common other than living within the same territorial boundaries? I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is a thought I am still trying to figure out…