Introduction: An African Diaspora Perspective For Urban Anthropology

Abstract

This special issue is the outgrowth of a 1985 American Anthropological Association symposium that the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) and the Society for Urban Anthropology (SUA) cosponsored.1 That session's and now this special issue's title plays on that of a recent book, BLACK FOLK HERE AND THERE: AN ESSAY IN HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, VOLUME I (1987)2 written by St. Clair Drake, to whom this two-phased project is dedicated. The title of Drake's publication in turn signals his debt to W.E.B. DuBois, the author of BLACK FOLK, THEN AND NOW: AN ESSAY IN THE HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF THE NEGRO RACE (1939). The works of these two scholars, among many others, belong to an intellectual tradition too little known, understood, or appreciated beyond the boundaries of Black and Pan-African Studies, a framework for producing both knowledge and praxis. The purpose of this project has been threefold. First, we aim to bring the contributions of pioneers like Drake to the current discourse in mainstream anthropology, particularly to urban anthropology. Second, our objective is to demonstrate how the directions many urban anthropologists now follow have precedents not only in the commonly cited literature but also in neglected works certain Afro-American scholars produced in the periphery of American academic and intellectual life. Our third aim is to take a recurrent and key theme in Drake's works, viz., variant forms of domination and popular response in Africa and the African diaspora, and to address this broad problem from a variety of perspectives. With sociologist Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, while still a University of Chicago graduate student, wrote BLACK METROPOLIS: A STUDY OF NEGRO LIFE IN A NORTHERN CITY (1945). This book was an outcome of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) team-research effort that Lloyd Warner and Horace Cayton administered during the late 1930s. Before