Yutaka Nakamura

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This article, at the most manifest level, is an ethnographic report on the discontent of an African-American Muslim man whom I met in the course of my fieldwork. The article focuses on his narrative, and relates and contrasts it with more general statements and narratives of the Nation of Islam (NOI), an African-American Muslim organization established around 1930. The man's discontent is frequently articulated with strong emotions. It employs racialist rhetoric, and sounds "violent" at least on certain occasions. While similar rhetoric can be found in the narratives of the NOI, previous studies on African-American Muslims only perceive it within the context of race relations in the United States. However, a long-term observation reveals that his discontent is not simply directed against the other racial groups. Whenever I see him, he strenuously complains not only about "White America," but also about "Harlemites," "black people," and "Muslims," all groups that he himself has been a member. Thus, it is not sufficient to interpret his discontent within the dynamics of race relations. Furthermore, his words do not necessarily materialize themselves as "violent acts," and the relationship between the object of his discontent and himself is not simply monolithic and hostile. Then, how can one interpret his discontent? This article perceives it as a problem that a certain African-American man encounters in his attempt to reconstruct a history of "his own people." The article, at the same time, deals with the position of archives in the histories of African-American Muslims. Here, the term "archive" is used to indicate that which is (theoretically) shareable. It not only includes written documents, but also paintings, icons, photographs, audio files, and so on. Moreover, I submit that an archive is not only an apparatus of memory and storage, but also that which directs what and how one remembers. For one thing, an archive, by determining that which is to be remembered, is also an apparatus of forgetting. That is, an archive chooses what to remember and what to forget. But an archive is also one of the many ways of remembering, and to talk about remembering and forgetting only with regards to an archive already predetermines a particular way of remembering. Then, the more it is believed that an archive can replay what has been archived in a manner that is faithful, precise, and intelligible to many, the more it becomes forgotten that modes of anamnesis exist without the mediation of an archive. But why focus on archives- It is because the articulation of discontent is deeply related, I believe, to the spread and permeation of an archive among people in what can be called "narrative culture," and to the concomitant transformation of their consciousness. The relationship between "narrative culture" and archive resonates with Walter J. Ong's "orality" and "literacy." Ong's main foci, of course, are societies without writing, and they are utterly different from the African-American Muslim community in Harlem, but that is precisely the source of the complexity of the problem that the article seeks to examine. On one hand, "oral culture" and "literal culture" are both present in the African-American Muslim community. While the tradition of "oral culture" has been inherited among them, and although some may have difficulty in writing, most of them are able to read English. On the other hand, with the progress of recording technology, their voices and narratives are more likely to be archived and transformed into something shareable. Besides such archivization of narratives, the infiltration of "literal culture" into the African-American community should also be noted. In order to examine the ways in which (View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)