Elements and function of Neo-Africanism in Gullah Geechee Culture

Diana Fletcher

An important element of the north American blackness, due  to its uniqueness,   is its lack of ethnic purity; not in the sense of miscegenation with the white race, less pronounced than in Cuba, but with the indigenous ones. It is this relationship with the Indians that operates their historical integration, even as opposition to the British colonies; affecting the cultural configuration of the Gullah Geechee belt, with the gradual return from forced migration to the Midwest.

This does not happen directly, since  communities removed to the Midwest do not return to the Southeast; but they do mix with the mass migrated to the North with emancipation, and whose descendants do return to the South. This return to the south is disorganized and lacks notable events that give it relevance an historical order; but it occurs punctually, in the general movement of families, in search of individual development. Even so, it have sufficient demographic density for  this reconfiguration of their communities; incorporating not only the political conflict of their complex origin, but also the indigenous cultural elements collected in its history.

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This would be the link of that Gullah Geechee belt with American culture, as its general framework; relativizing the ethnic pressure  it exerts on it, in a complex and dynamic relationship with this framework. There is no doubt  of  the direct ethnic pressure from the Gullah Geechee belt, characterized by its extreme singularity; but this singularity (exceptional) is not functionally distinct from those of the Indian reservations, within that North American spectrum.

Now, precisely because of its lower isolation as an emergent structure, this singularity would be more active than the indigenous ones; allowing in this greater link a more effective pressure than the purely indigenousones, in their concrete practices.  As an aside, this would be what allows a greater incidence of black culture in the renewal of the West culture in general; by infusing it with its own vitality, in the  face of the slow decline of purely indigenous, perfectly isolated with its reservation’s system.

With the precariousness of its equilibrium, it is also this margin  what neutralizes the political pressure of separatism;  since, as we would have seen,  the (neo-African) singularity  is not absolute, like that of the indigenous reserves. This cultural structure does not admit therefore the political alternative that requires a separatist emergency; since  their determinations are those of this American structure, which is what provides them in their functional relativity.

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Note that this impossibility of a total political fracture is characteristic exclusively of the Gullah Geechee singularity; it does not refer to the parallel —and diachronic— process of that other general structure, in  which decays the whole West. In this case, the political trauma would only highlight that singularity of a neo-African culture, making it more conflictive; but it’ll still remains like the transcendent link that hinders this fracture, because of the complex density of its immanence.

As a principle, this contradiction would result in the weakening of the political capacity of this singularity; subordinating it, even tangentially, to the neo-conservative surveillance of the new ideological liberalism. Curiously, however, it also allows the reconciliation of the internal contradictions of this singularity; so it can eventually mature into its own emergence, reverting to that general structure, with its renewal.

Remember that it is a thesis, by which religion is what organizes the hermeneutical spectrum in culture; providing in their cosmogonies the (cosmological) referents for existential reflection, in the praxis of this culture. The religious substructure can no longer provide this supra-structural function, having loss its capacity for political determination; a process matured with Modernity, but brought to its apotheosis as decadence, with postmodernity.

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Alluding to the very precariousness of all equilibrium, this would be a process  that can be accelerated or delayed; always depending on the specific events in which it takes place, but which also make it inevitable as a process.  In any case, it is precisely because of this singularity, which does not contradict but conditions and adjusts its actuality; reaching with this the maturity that achieves the hermeneutic renewal of the West, when religion can no longer fulfill that function.