With a booming economy that afforded numerous opportunities for
immigrants throughout the 1990s, the Twin Cities area has attracted
people of African descent from throughout the United States and the
world and is fast becoming a transnational metropolis. Minnesota's
largest urban area, the region now also has the country's most diverse
black population. A closely drawn ethnography, Creating Africa in
America: Translocal Identity in an Emerging World City seeks to
understand and evaluate the process of identity formation in the context
of globalization in a way that is also site specific.
Bringing to this study a rich and interesting professional history and
expertise, Jacqueline Copeland-Carson focuses on a Minneapolis-based
nonprofit, the Cultural Wellness Center, which combines different ethnic
approaches to bodily health and community well-being as the basis for a
shared, translocal African culture. The book explores how the body can
become a surrogate locus for identity, thus displacing territory as the
key referent for organizing and experiencing African diasporan
diversity. Showing how alternatives are created to mainstream majority
and Afrocentric approaches to identity, she addresses the way that
bridges can be built in the African diaspora among different African
immigrant, African American, and other groups.
As this thoughtful and compassionate ethnographic study shows, the fact
that there is no simple and concrete way to define how one can be
African in contemporary America reflects the tangled nature of cultural
processes and social relations at large. Copeland-Carson demonstrates
the cultural creativity and social dexterity of people living in an
urban setting, and suggests that anthropologists give more attention to
the role of the nonprofit sector as a forum for creating community and
identity throughout African diasporan history in the United States.
