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This book chronicles the experiences of first and second generation West African immigrants and refugees in the United States during the last four decades. Drawing on field work and oral histories of West African immigrants aggregated in various locations from West Africa to the West Indies to destinations like metropolitan Atlanta, the book examines how significant segments of black America are forging new meanings and interpretive frameworks for understanding the paradigm of the Atlantic World. More specifically, it explores the transfiguration in the diversity and complexity of the role of the new West African diaspora in the recent history of the black Atlantic. It considers the intricate patterns of adaptation and incorporation among the immigrants and their children, along with the impact of the recent postcolonial and voluntary immigration of West Africans on the changing meanings of “African Americanness.” It also tackles issues of cultural identity formation and socioeconomic incorporation among immigrants and refugees from West Africa, and whether these migrants will become the newest African Americans.

This chapter examines how transnationalism emerged as a vital component of West African immigrants' everyday life in the United States. More specifically, it considers how West Africans systematically maintained homeland ties and transoceanic connections. It first discusses the different patterns of West African transnationalism, such as sustaining solid bonds between America and their African homelands through visits for vacations, weddings, burials, and the temporary relocation of American-born children. It then explores how the immigrants strive for “comfortable homes” in the United States while sustaining and enhancing ties across nationalities, ethnicities, continents, and American states and cities. It also describes the virtual and actual boundary crossings that reflect connections beyond a singular link between homeland and host societies. Finally, it explains how transnational networks enabled the newcomers, through their homes of origin and other locations of the West African diaspora, to shape their American experiences.

This chapter examines the contentious relationship between West African immigrants and African Americans. West Africans, like other black immigrants, have adapted and assimilated in three main domains: within the reconfigured African ethnicities, within the milieu of African Americans, and within mainstream America. The newcomers have benefited from the dividends of the civil rights movement since the post-1965 wave came to America. The complicated face of race in the United States nonetheless has been lost on many of the West African diaspora, who instead see only a postracial America. This chapter first considers the divide between West African and African American Islam and goes on to discuss the killing of Amadou Diallo as the turning point in the public's awareness of a growing West African presence in America. It then explores racial politics and alliances between black immigrants and African Americans and concludes with an assessment of how West African immigrants' increasing interactions with the native-born continuously redefine the meanings of African American race and culture.

This chapter examines the rise of a West African enclave economy in America. In particular, it considers how entrepreneurship and self-employment became the most conspicuous marker of the West African diaspora in America. It explores how some of the new West African entrepreneurs moved from work in the wage economy to start and manage their own business ventures in order to capture opportunities that distinctly favored their West African backgrounds and American experiences. It also discusses the economic culture within which the West African immigrants function as entrepreneurs and its importance for the specific detour opportunity areas in which they have established their businesses, especially restaurants and clubs, hair braiding, health care staffing and pharmacy, grocery stores or African supermarkets, and fashion production and merchandising. Finally, the chapter explores some of the reasons for the weakening or demise of West African businesses in America.

This book has explored the question of whether post-civil rights era immigrants from continental Africa are becoming the newest African Americans in the United States. It has shown that the immigrants that comprise the new West African diaspora in America are very much communities in the making. In contrast to Eugene Robinson's argument that contemporary black America, including its cohort of emergent African immigrants, is seeped in the process of disintegration, the book sees the current dynamics as one of reintegration. The book concludes by reflecting on how West African immigrants are remaking what it means to be both African and American in the twenty-first century.