Slavery and the Ambiguities of Diaspora in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa

Abstract:In this essay, I question how the Ethiopian-American director Haile Gerima theorizes diaspora in his 1993 historical drama Sankofa. By reading against the grain of the film’s ideological project of reconciling the trauma and indignity of African slavery in the New World, I consider how Sankofa’s investments in a transhistorical account of race underpin its mission to remind the black descendants of enslaved Africans of their ancestors’ inalienable human dignity. While Sankofa endeavors to draw African and African diasporic histories closer by dramatizing “return” at Cape Coast Castle in southern Ghana, the film’s attention to its diasporic audience omits African experiences of the slave trade and creates a notably ambiguous relationship between diaspora, slavery, and the filmmaker’s distinct idea of Africa.