The formation of the African American community in the United States

Abstract

The literature of the Diaspora is particularly interesting in the contemporary world as more and more people come to find themselves voluntarily or involuntarily displaced. Displacement is the material reality of globalization. Even as there are political reverberations, it is the psychological trauma that forms the basis of my study. This is because each group negotiates with the new social context in a different way. Some groups may look to migration with optimism because of the new life that a new location promises. Other groups like the African slaves were forcefully transported en masse to America, and saw it as the destruction of a way of life for commercial gains. This combined with their economic disenfranchisement to make it difficult to achieve oneness with their new locale. It will be the effort of this paper to focus particularly on the manner in which the African American people regrouped through negotiations with itself and the dominant white population. In order to understand their vulnerabilities and the ways in which they sought to strengthen themselves, I will be looking at a range of texts over a period of time since identity formation is a lengthy process. Although assimilation would be the key to integration, I will be looking at this extent to which this is possible as well as desirable.