Documenting the Diaspora: historian couple investigate central Africa's place in world history, rooting Black studies in an international context

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 4, 2004 by Ronald Roach

Traveling to the Vatican to study documents once belonging to a 17th-century central African diplomat may seem an unlikely project for professors in an African American studies program. But for Drs. John Thornton and Linda Heywood, husband and wife historians, the trek they made earlier this year to Rome represents just one facet of the broad scope of Black studies scholarship for which they are known.

At a time when Black studies programs at American colleges and universities are placing increasing emphasis on the impact of Black migrations and movements throughout the world, scholars such as Thornton and Heywood are gaining prominence in the discipline due to the shilling focus. Scholars like this couple, who are now reshaping Black studies along international dimensions, often bring to their specialties fluency in two or more languages; backgrounds in European, Latin American, African or Asian studies; and an interest in examining the wide diversity of the Black experience both in and outside Africa.

As professors in the African American studies program at Boston University, Thornton and Heywood are gaining attention for at least two projects whose implications illustrate how African Diaspora research may serve to reorient Black studies. The one initiative that had the couple conducting research at Vatican City this year involves their investigation of letters and documents that were carried by Antonio Manuel, a diplomat from the Kingdom of Kongo, as he traveled from central Africa to the Vatican from 1604 to 1608. After a long delayed journey, Manuel died just three days after arriving in Rome.

The research is expected to shed considerable light on one of Africa's first independent nations, the Kingdom of Kongo, which existed in what is now Angola. "(Kongo) was operating at a level of sophistication that most people don't associate with Africa" during that period of time, Thornton says. "They had a large strata of literate people. The surviving letters indicate this."

The second project, which encompasses the research that has revealed Kongo to have been a highly sophisticated and developed nation for its time, is expected to re-establish the origins of the African slaves brought to the New World during establishment of the first English, Dutch, Swedish and French colonies. Heywood and Thornton are contending in a forthcoming book that the first generations of African slaves brought to the colonies, such as in Virginia and New York, during the 1600s were not of West African origin, but originated directly from central Africa.

"(They've) got good evidence for making that argument. I have high regard for them," says Dr. Ronald Hoffman, a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

GOING INTERNATIONAL

The direction of Black studies at Boston University (BU) where the program bills itself as "African American studies" has a strong international focus, according to observers. Upon his appointment in 2000 as the director of the African American studies program, Dr. Ronald Richardson proclaimed his intentions to root Black studies in an international context.

"We're living in a different era now, and scholars of African American studies have to be in a position to comment on issues beyond Black-White relations. Few people have studied the global impact of Black people, economically, socially and culturally, but they have had an impact, and we want to show what it is," Richardson said.

For his part, Richardson, whose expertise includes modern European cultural and intellectual history, political theory and medieval Europe, has written extensively about race in Europe. He is the author of Moral Imperium, which is a study of the English anti-slavery movement. His book, Winston S. Churchill." Imagining the Racial Self, is forthcoming. Prior to joining BU, Richardson had stints as a visiting associate professor in Afro-American studies at Harvard University, an associate history professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and an assistant history professor at Howard University.

"We knew Richardson was very interested in looking at African American studies not only in a national context but throughout the world," says Heywood about Richardson, who had been a colleague of hers when she taught at Howard University.

One of the first hires to the BU program by Richardson was Dr. Allison Blakely, who now occupies the George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies. Blakely, an accomplished scholar of Russian and European history who has written extensively about Blacks in Europe, had known both Heywood and Richardson previously as fellow Howard history department faculty members.

Blakely, a history professor since the early 1970s, says that in the early years of his career, his research interests left him regarded as a peripheral figure in Black studies. Now that some Black studies programs are moving beyond the Black American experience as the dominant focus, Blakely believes his work has gained wider appreciation in the Black studies world.