For more than a decade a vicious civil war has torn the fabric of
society in the West African country of Sierra Leone, forcing thousands
to flee their homes for refugee camps and others to seek peace and
asylum abroad. Sierra Leoneans have established new communities around
the world, in London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
Yet despite the great geographic range of this diaspora and the diverse
ethnic backgrounds among Sierra Leoneans settled in the same communities
abroad, these Africans have come to understand and express their shared
identity through religious rituals, social engagements, and material
culture.
In An Imagined Geography, anthropologist JoAnn D'Alisera demonstrates
persuasively that the long-held anthropological paradigms of separate,
bounded, and unique communities, geographically located and neatly
localized, must be reconsidered. Studying Sierra Leonean Muslims living
in greater Washington, D.C., she shows how these immigrants maintain
intense and genuine community ties through weddings, rituals, and
travel, across both vast urban spaces and national boundaries. D'Alisera
examines two primary issues: Sierra Leoneans' engagement with their
homeland, to which they frequently traveled and often sent their
children for upbringing until the outbreak of the civil war; and the
Sierra Leonean interaction with a diverse, multicultural, increasingly
global Muslim community that is undergoing its own search for identity.
Sierra Leoneans in America, D'Alisera observes, express a longing for
home and the pain of disconnection in powerful narratives about their
country and about their own displacement. At the same time, however,
self and communal identity are shaped by a pressing need to affiliate in
their adopted country with Sierra Leoneans of all ethnic and religious
backgrounds and with fellow Muslims from other parts of the world, a
process that is played out against the complex social field of the
American urban landscape.
