Has the Past Passed? On the Role of Historic Memory in Shaping the Relations between African Americans and Contemporary African Migrants in the USA

Suomen Antropologi. 2015. Vol. 40. No. 3. P. 5–30.

Bondarenko D. M.

African Americans and contemporary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “Black community”. Their relations are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion. Based on field evidence, the article discusses the role played in it by the reflection in historic memory and place in mass consciousness of African Americans and African migrants of key events in Black American and African history: transatlantic slave trade, slavery, its abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement in the US, colonialism, anticolonial struggle, and the fall of apartheid regime in South Africa. It is shown that they see the key events of the past differently, and different events are seen as key by each group. Collective historic memory works more in the direction of separating the two groups from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception.

Keywords: USA, mass consciousness, African Americans, historic memory, African migrants, intercultural interaction