The Crisis of Belonging in Diaspora Studies

• In Event: Representing the Diaspora’s Emergence/ies

Abstract

With the increased interest in tracing lineage and taking at-home DNA tests specifically geared towards African-Americans, I am interested in how the contentiousness of belonging is presumed to be only experienced by the descendants of those who were forcefully removed from the continent, and less complicated for immigrants and their descendants due to their “blood ties” to one specific place. I seek to name and identify the ways that belonging is not so easily remedied by blood and the meaning we attribute to it, and the ways that colonization and anti-blackness create a sense of homelessness amongst black people globally. To this end I examine how women artists of the Nigerian diaspora embrace this “disbelonging” as a liberatory position and use contemporary visual art, performance, film, and literature to contest and redefine familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its elsewheres. I argue that their artmaking is an act of worldmaking that creates opportunities to disrupt and reorder how we think about transnational flows, unsettles oppressive conceptualizations of community and family to embrace tension, and considers the ways in which connections are broken and created anew.

Author

• Bimbola Akinbola, Northwestern University