Diasporic African identity is a colonial creolization, not preservation of origins.

Evidence

Anthropologically, this question has often been approached in terms of “survivals.” The signs and traces of that presence are, of course, everywhere. “Africa” lives not only in the retention of African words and syntactic structures in language or rhythmic patterns in music but in the way African speech forms have permanently disrupted, inflected, and subverted the way Caribbean people speak, the way they appropriated “English,” the master tongue. It “lives” in the way every Caribbean Christian congregation, familiar with every line of the Moody and Sankey hymnal, nonetheless drag and elongate the pace of “Onward Christian Soldiers” back down to a more grounded body-rhythm and vocal register. Africa is alive and well in the diaspora. But it is neither the Africa of those territories, now obscured by the postcolonial map maker, from which slaves were snatched for transportation, nor the Africa of today, which is at least four or five different “continents” rolled into one, its forms of subsistence destroyed, its peoples structurally adjusted into a devastating modern poverty. The “Africa” that is alive and well in this part of the world is what Africa has become in the New World, in the violent vortex of colonial syncretism, reforged in the furnace of the colonial cook-pot. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 853

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key concept: diaspora identity as hybrid product of violent colonial syncretism — the ‘colonial cook-pot’ mechanism — rather than survival of precolonial culture.
• XREF: This is the core theorization of cultural hybridity/creolization that later postcolonial and Islamophobia readings will inherit: subaltern agency as inflection and subversion of the master’s forms, not separate from them.
• CANDY: The image of Caribbean congregations dragging ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ down to a grounded body-rhythm is a vivid, tweetable illustration of cultural reworking.