Trans-African Identity: Cultural Globalisation and the Role of the Symbolic-Aesthetic Dimension in the Present Identity Construction Processes

Abstract

Globalisation entails a process of intensification of trans-societal and transcultural spaces, events, problems, economic transactions, conflicts and biographies, a process not necessarily unfolding in a centripetal, homogeneous and single way but rather in a polycentric, multidimensional one, dialectically contingent on the local. This synthesis between global and local takes place by means of a dichotomy: the global takes  possession of the infrastructural, structural and axiological levels, leading societies towards a certain uniformisation; the local remains at the aesthetic level of symbols and icons, shaping self-referred differential identities. This article is aimed at exploring one of these new aesthetics, one that we have labelled the trans-African or black trans-national identity – that of all the communities around
the world that claim an African descent.