Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden, Africa and African Americans: A New History
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1Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden, Africa and African Americans: A New History.
2Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 280. ISBN: 9780300258523
3Author: Aaron Pride, Lafayette College
4Among a plethora of new texts exploring the relationship between various communities of people of African descent and their conception and understanding of Africana identity, Nemata Blyden’s Africa and African Americans: A New History, stands out as a seminal interpretation of the historical conceptions of African American identity and the collective sense of blackness demarcated by it and associated with it. In this work, Blyden delves into the complex meanings and perspectives of Africa that have animated and shaped African American views of themselves, the continent, and its inhabitants. This book also interrogates how Africans have experienced the United States in the context of contestations of the meaning of blackness across the African Diaspora. The main argument of Blyden’s work is that “the discussion surrounding what men and women of African descent call themselves is tied to their condition and historical moments” (11). In making this assertion, Blyden explores the shifting definitions and meanings of being African American in the United States. In her rendering of the history of the black presence in North America, Blyden explicates the question of blacks’ desires forsocial equality and political inclusion by fore grounding her narrative into her familial historyas a lens to understand the diversity of people included within African America across time and space.
5By approaching black history in the United States through the experiences of various generations of her family, Blyden provides a compelling narrative of the evolution of black identity in American society. In the introduction of Africa and African Americans, Blyden describes the courtship of her parents, Edward Blyden III, an African immigrant from Sierra Leone, and Amelia Kendrick, an African American woman from the American South. In recounting this event, Blyden presents her parents as representative of the attitudes and opinions of both Africans and African Americans. From this perspective, the union of Blyden’s parents exemplified the different understandings of Africa that existed between blacks that lived on the continent and experienced it firsthand as opposed to those in the diaspora that experienced Africa as a figment of their imagination. In citing this anecdote, Blyden explores a core theme and attribute of Africa and African American which contrasted the material reality of life in Africa in comparison to the fantasies many blacks outside Africa had. Africa and African Americans examines this discussion as both Africans in Africa and African descended people outside Africa gain knowledge about one another andredefine the contours on African American consciousness.
6 In Africa and African Americans, Blyden also explores the life of her ancestor, Edward Wilmot Blyden, a black man born in the Caribbean, who became a leading proponent of black migration to Africa in the nineteenth century. In offering a biographical account of Blyden’s life and his eventual settlement in Liberia, Africa and African Americanscompels readers to seriously consider why and how blacks throughout the diaspora decided to leave their places of birth to return to their ancestral homes on the African continent. This episode accentuates the main argument of the text that asserts that the meaning of African American identity has been informed and shaped by patterns of black migration from African to the Americas and vice versa.
7 Africa and African Americans makes an important contribution to the literature on the changing demographics of the African American population in the United States. This book presents a nuanced narrative of the many choices blacks confronted in the context of racial oppression in American society. This text provides substantial background on the political debates within the black community over strategies to overcome racial animus. Blyden’s work pays less attention to African cultural traditions among African American communities in the United States. The main area of focus for Africa and African Americans is the socio-political dimensions of African American identity. Blyden moves chronologically from discussions over protest and immigration to Africa to black freedom struggles and African independence movements to the election of Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement and contextualizes these events in conversation with the development and maturation of African American identity.
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References
Electronic reference
Aaron Pride, “Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden, Africa and African Americans: A New History”, European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 07 September 2021, connection on 12 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/17233; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.17233
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