Decoding Diaspora: Mapping J. A. Rogers' Mythic Africa Main Menu Table of Contents Explore and Navigate the Different Facets of the Decoding Diaspora project. Researchers and Community Partners Participants and Partners in Decoding Diaspora Data Access the Data for Your Own Research Interpretations Use Digital Tools to Explore How J. A. Rogers Understood "Africa" Essays Experimental Studies Using the Data and Interpreations Featured Here References Project Bibliography and Recommended Readings Use and Permissions Terms and Conditions Governing the Creation and Use of the Project

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While a doctoral student, I grew fascinated by African American cultural history. My interested was less in the actuality of the past and more in the need for it. The links between what did (or did not) happen and what could or --as more often expressed--needs to happen, beckoned my attention; for the "color line" was in fact an alluring prism refracting the politics of identity. Hence much of my scholarly attention has been devoted to the "chronotypes" of Black social formation. In my first book, Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox 2020), I examined how the novel, multimedia phenomenon that was Roots reflected, modeled, and shaped how modern people work though cultural texts.

As my family glimpsed my emerging research, they offered me the oblique offering that is food for thought. The most haunting example came from my mother in the form of a crumbling scrapbook of newspaper clippings and the question, "What do you think of this?" She had received it from her late mother. Lucille Rice, who had assembled it from a collection of her late son, John Rice. Over the years I began to investigate the scrapbook, its pages deteriorating with each viewing. And though I have gained some insight into what this book is, I am still determining what I think of it.

The scrapbook is a collection of roughly 100 newspaper clippings from a mid-twentieth century serial called Facts About the Negro. These were created by Joel Augustus Rogers, a Jamaican-American journalist and amateur historian. Rogers', who immigrated to New York in 1906, observed that the discourse on race in the United States was not only different than in Jamaica but in desperate need of revision. Rogers' launched a number of projects to achieve this, including a book From Superman to Man, which refutes the notion of the "ubermensch" in white supremacist ideology. But it was Rogers' Facts About the Negro that argued for the persistent, pervasive, and prodigious presence of African-descended peoples in world history.

Riffing on Ripley's Believe It or Not, the short, illustrated articles presented evocative snippets of what Rogers initially title "Your History." The crux of the argument was that there could be no discussion of civilization without discussing the history and contributions of the African diaspora. Its images were initially drawn by George Lee, and later Samuel Millai. Rogers' penned the commentary and published the syndicated column in Black newspapers. The archive in my possession does not contain the entirety of Facts About the Negro, but it is a collection that raises a number of questions for students of the African diaspora, specifically, and culture, more broadly.


 

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