Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora

Abstract

Eslanda Robeson, the wife of Paul Robeson, trained as an anthropologist in the 1930s and drew on the field as she contributed to U.S. public discourse on race and racism during the 1940s. Focusing on her 1945 travel narrative, African Journey, and her public lectures, this article describes the ways she constructed an alternative, positive representation of Africa and people of African descent. I examine her work in relation to pan-Africanist activism, the politics of identification, and anthropological research that facilitated her practice of marking political and cultural connections among people of African descent. I view Robeson as a public intellectual engaged in the construction of representations that sought to reshape the ways Black and white Americans thought about Africa and their relationship to the continent.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• Eslanda Goode Robeson
• identity
• pan-African activism
• race and representation

Thanks to Mr. Paul Robeson, Jr., Mrs. Esther Jackson, Mrs. Joellen El Bashir, Mrs. Thelma Dale Perkins, St. Clair Bourne, Bill Tles, Elsa Barkley Brown, Mary Helen Washington, Richard Yarborough, Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, Connie Sutton, Deborah Thomas, Tina Campt, Mary Mahon, and Brian Tate. I presented an early version of this paper at the African American Identity Travels Conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, in September 2004. I thank the conference participants, especially Yevette Richards and Penny Von Eschen, for their comments and questions.

Notes

1. Eslanda G. Robeson, African Journey (New York: John Day Company, 1945), 13.

2. For biographical information used throughout the article, I have drawn from materials in Eslanda Robeson's Biographical Sketches File, Personal Papers Box, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers in the Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, and Pearl S. Buck with Eslanda Goode Robeson, An American Argument (New York: John Day Company, 1949); Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (London: Pan Books, 1989); and Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey, 1898–1939 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001).

3. For example, see multiple authors, “Tribute to Eslanda Robeson,” Freedomways, (1966): 327–357; Faye V. Harrison and Ira E. Harrison, “Introduction: Anthropology, African Americans, and the Emancipation of a Subjugated Knowledge,” in African-American Pioneers in Anthropology, eds. I. E. Harrison and F. V. Harrison (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1999); Barbara Ransby, “Eslanda Goode Robeson, Pan-Africanist,” Sage 3 no. 2 (1986): 22–26; and Robert Shaffer, “Out of the Shadows: The Political Writings of Eslanda Goode Robeson,” in Paul Robeson: Essays on His Life and Legacy, eds. J. Dorinson and W. Pencak (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2002). Shaffer provides a concise overview of Robeson's writings and career as journalist and lecturer.

4. Examples include Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tina Campt, Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Kamari Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1987); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Faye V. Harrison, “Introduction: An African Diaspora Perspective for Urban Anthropology,” Urban Anthropology 17, no. 2–3 (1988): 111–141; and Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds., Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (London: Verso, 1994).

5. For discussions of the impact of pan-Africanism on Black scholars and activists in the United States, see St. Clair Drake, “Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Second Edition, ed. J. E. Harris (Washington, DC: Howard University Press); Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora” Social Text 66, 19 no. 1 (2001): 45–73; Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Second Edition (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993); Lemelle and Kelley 1994; Elliott P. Skinner, “Afro-Americans in Search of Africa: The Scholars' Dilemma,” in Transformation and Resiliency in Africa As Seen by Afro-American Scholars, eds. P. T. Robinson and E. P. Skinner (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983); and Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

6. Harrison and Harrison, “Anthropology, African Americans,” 12; cf. St. Clair Drake, “Anthropology and the Black Experience,” The Black Scholar September–October, (1980): 2, 10; Skinner, “Afro-Americans in Search,” 6.

7. Mildred C. Ludecke to Eslanda Robeson, February 15, 1946, Eslanda Robeson Correspondence File, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers, Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection, Moorland–Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

8. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 293.

9. Hollis R. Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs, 1937–19 55 (Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 1978), 19.

10. E. G. Robeson, What Do the People of Africa Want? (New York: Council on African Affairs, 1945); Lynch, Black American Radicals, 29, 34.

11. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 13.

12. P. Robeson, The Undiscovered, 47.

13. Buck with Robeson, American Argument, 15.

14. P. Robeson The Undiscovered, 47.

15. E. G. Robeson, “Black Paris,” Challenge: A Literary Quarterly 1 no. 4 (1936): 12–18 and “Black Paris, II,” Challenge: A Literary Quarterly 1 no. 5 (1936): 9–12.

16. E. G. Robeson to Carl and Fania Van Vechten, April 5, 1934, Carl Van Vechten Collection: Box Rj-Rz, Folder 1934–39. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

17. Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. Third revised and enlarged edition (London: Routledge, 1996). In addition to training a generation of anthropologists, Malinowski also taught African diaspora leaders like Ralph Bunche, who became a civil rights activist and Nobel Prize winner, and Jomo Kenyatta, who became the first prime minister of independent Kenya.

18. Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973).

19. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 14.

20. Ibid., 15.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 16.

23. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

24. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 15.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid, 5.

27. Zora Neale Hurston to Eslanda Robeson, April 18, 1934, Eslanda Robeson Correspondence File, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers, Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, 1934.

28. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men. With introduction by Robert Hemenway (New York: Perennial Library, 1978).

29. For example, Harrison and Harrison, “Anthropology, African Americans,” 23–25; Faye V. Harrison, “Black Women Putting Anthropology into Action from Corporate Academia to the United Nations: The Unexpected Consequences and Unfulfilled Expectations of a Reclamation Project.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 2002.

30. Apartheid became official South African policy in 1948, but the country was highly segregated at the time of Robeson's visit in 1936.

31. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 65, 59, 71, 37, 73.

32. Ibid., 47–48.

33. For details about the filming, see Duberman, Paul Robeson, 178–182.

34. For discussion and critique of these tropes of the Other in anthropology, see James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); and Mariana Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

35. For examples, see Asad, Colonial Encounter; Clifford, “Ethnographic Authority;” Fabian Time and the Other; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Rosaldo, Culture and Truth.

36. Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12–13.

37. Ibid., 7, 10–11.

38. Ibid., 7; cf. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 201.

39. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 103.

40. Ibid., 93.

41. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15.

42. Ibid., 17.

43. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 154, original emphasis.

44. Ibid., 109.

45. E. G. Robeson, What do the People of Africa Want, 15, original emphasis.

46. Typescripts of these lectures with places and dates of lectures in Eslanda G. Robeson Papers: Box 12. Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

47. E. G. Robeson, “Inter-cultural and Inter-racial Relations,” April 7, 1944, 9. Typescript, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers: Box 10. Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 9–10.

50. Ibid., 1.

51. Some representative examples include Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind. Public Affairs Pamphlet 85 (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943); Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 [1941]); and M. F. Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). For an analysis of the role American anthropologists played in the construction and deconstruction of the concept of race, see Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

52. E. G. Robeson, “A Negro Looks at Africa,” Asia and the Americas November (1944): 501.

53. Franz Boas, “The Outlook for the American Negro,” in A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911, ed. G. W. Stocking, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past.

54. E. G. Robeson, “A Negro Looks at Africa,” 501.

55. Ibid., 502.

56. Ibid. Boas made these comments in a speech delivered to the 1906 graduating class of Atlanta University at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois; Boas, “The Outlook,” 311.

57. E. G. Robeson, “Africa: Its Cultural Heritage and Present Problems,” 1949, 10. Typescript, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers: Box 12. Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

58. Gupta and Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice,” 12–15.

59. E. G. Robeson, “Africa: Its Cultural Heritage,” 10.

60. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974).

61. E. G. Robeson, “The Negro Pattern of World Affairs,” 1947, 22–23, Typescript, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers: Box 12. Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

62. E. G. Robeson, “Race Relations Lecture,” 1944, 12. Typescript, Eslanda G. Robeson Papers: Box 10. Paul and Eslanda Robeson Collection. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

63. E. G. Robeson, “A Negro Looks at Africa,” Asia and the Americas November, (1944): 501.

64. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

65. E. G. Robeson, African Journey, 13.

66. Ibid., 133.

67. Ibid., 61.

68. See, for example, discussions in Brown Dropping Anchor; Campt Other Germans; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.

69. For example, Gilroy, Black Atlantic.