"Africa" in Minnesota: New Models of Translocal Culture

The past fifteen years have witnessed the largest migration of Africans to the United States since the transatlantic slave trade. Africans are establishing communities and re-creating culture in places throughout the United States, however, Africanists are just beginning to study African immigrant culture, history and politics in North America. Using the ethnographic case example of a nonprofit organization in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, this paper presents some of the ways that Africans may be re-creating culture and identity in the context of American ethnic diversity. In particular it presents how some Twin Cities Africans might be adapting American notions of race, and building relations with American-born people of African descent from the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. It argues that geographically bound notions of identity and culture based on the African continent are no longer sufficient if Africanists wish to understand African cultures in the age of globalization. This paper is based on research presented by the author, in her book, "Creating Africa in America: Translocal Identity in an Emerging World City" (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press).