Challenging Popularized Narratives of Immigrant Youth From West Africa: Examining Social Processes of Navigating Identities and Engaging Civically

Practices of Decolonizing Knowledge: Using Heritage Practices and Attending to Indigenous Knowledges

Practices of decolonizing knowledge in educational lives of immigrant youth from West African countries in the United States involve moving beyond Eurocentric paradigms when examining how immigrant youth navigate identities and engage civically. By practices of decolonizing knowledge we refer, as Dei (2000) notes, to “seeing Africa beyond the boundaries created by colonial authorities and making the necessary internal and external linkages with local groups and Diasporic and other colonized peoples” (p. 118). Moreover, practices of decolonizing knowledge such as navigating identities and engaging civically build on and extend heritage practices of culturally and linguistically diverse youth.

By heritage practices, Paris and Alim (2014) note, for instance, research Paris engaged with Mexicana/o, Mexican American, and Pacific Islander youth at a high school and in a California community. Youth negotiated identities across “cultural practices” of African American Language and hip-hop, as well as “heritage practices” of Spanish or Samoan learned from community elders (p. 91). Paris and Alim (2014) note deficit perspectives in pedagogies in U.S. schools have historically required that youth of color experience a loss of “heritage practices and ways of knowing” (p. 90). The authors further argue, “Equity and access can best be achieved by centering pedagogies on the heritage and contemporary practices of students and communities of color” (p. 87). We ask how may researchers, policymakers, and educators view heritage practices of immigrant youth from West African countries, such as their linguistic assets, or immigrant communities’ stance-taking toward learning as involving varied lifelong experiences, as social processes disrupting areas of inequalities. Paris (2012) furthermore cautions that pedagogies involving heritage practices must involve “considering the shifting and changing practices of students and their communities” (p. 94). In this way, Paris and Alim (2014) understand “heritage practices” and “community practices” as

based in contemporary understandings of culture as dynamic, shifting, and encompassing both past-oriented heritage dimensions and present-oriented community dimensions. These dimensions in turn are not entirely distinct but take on different salience depending on how young people live race, ethnicity, language, and culture. (p. 90)

We furthermore consider how may researches, policymakers, and educators view immigrant youth from West African countries, navigating identities across varied contexts such as families, peers, and schooling, as enacting fluid, ongoing heritage practices as social processes across youth’s past, present, and future experiences of teaching and learning.

Toward a Sankofan Approach in Navigating Identities and Engaging Civically

“Sankofa” refers to the Adinkra pictorial image symbol in Akan culture in Ghana, of a bird looking back as simultaneously its body is positioned to move forward. Scholars note Sankofa has come to mean, “‘Go back and fetch it,’ ‘return to your past,’ and ‘it is not taboo to go back and retrieve what you have forgotten or lost’” (Temple, 2010, p. 127). Haile Gerima’s 1993 movie, titled Sankofa, introduced Sankofa to many U.S. audiences, portraying an African American model symbolically transported across present, past, and future, from Cape Coast Castle, in Ghana, to enslavement on a Louisiana plantation in the United States, then back to Ghana. Massaquoi (2004) asserts the film underscored “how we as Diasporic Africans harness our collective memory and learn from our collective experience” (p. 143). Uses of Sankofa, Temple (2010) notes, have since emerged in the United States as “Diasporan practice,” for example, in the “naming of schools, bakeries, beauty products, businesses, [and] rites of passage programs” (pp. 128–129). Temple notes Black residents in the United States use Sankofa in such ways to evoke a “reversal of [. . .] ahistorical thinking” (p. 129) toward “deliberately and concisely cultivat[ing] and preserv[ing] African culture and philosophies” (p. 130).

Jorgensen (2001) complicates a notion of Sankofa as underscoring static pasts, noting that Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, “revived the old Akan symbol, Sankofa” to emphasize “the interrelatedness of past, present and future [. . .] rallying Ghanaians around the same symbols (p. 123). Jorgensen (2001) examined how students and teachers’ negotiated cultural identities as students created TV and film productions at a professional film school in Accra, Ghana. Students and teachers continually evoked Sankofa across discussions, lectures, and cultural gatherings, complicating boundaries of past-present-future. Students understood Sankofa, as Jorgensen notes, as “traditional,” yet “something with a continuity from the past [. . .], thus closely tied to a conscious or unconscious view of time as being split between past, present and future” (p. 139). In this way, with meanings “survived and adapted to the changing social and cultural changes” (p. 140), Sankofa across contexts of public discourses of TV and film narratives produced by Ghanaians underscored heritage practices as evolving.

As academic inquiry, Temple (2010) notes, understandings of Sankofa have “not yet benefited from systematic study” (p. 133). However scholars have used Sankofan approaches across education research literature (Tedla, 1995; M. J. Watson & Wiggan, 2016), health (Earl, 2010), and psychology; Hamilton Abegunde (2011), for example, examining urban violence in Chicago, notes Sankofa as a process “allows an individual to see his or her connections and responsibilities to a community, without limitations of space and time, and with a fuller grasp of history” (p. 21).

Tedla (1995) conceptualizes a “Sankofan education” across Akan and Yoruban culture, writings of W. E .B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and Malawian language; and further grounded in “indigenous African thought and education while it judiciously borrows ideas and technologies from other peoples of the world” (p. 209). Moreover, Tedla asserts the urgency of a Sankofan education at a time of dominant public discourses such as popular-media narratives, and “the uncritical and often unconscious absorption of the negative images projected about Africans through the media, music, books, and the education system” (p. 209). In health research, Earl (2010) conducts a “Sankofan socio-ethical” analysis of 10 years of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, considering the center’s “past, present, and possible future” (p. 8). For example, Earl notes how historian Susan Reverby, in her 2009 book examining the syphilis study, “employs a research method that [. . .] values the voices of the victims (testifiers) as having as much right to be heard as those of the physicians who were in charge of the study” (p. 12). Reverby evokes in Sankofa the notion of looking back, in “affirming and releasing the voices of the Black poor, in recognizing their authentic power to bear witness to the truth” (p. 14).

Karenga (2005) furthermore notes Sankofa in Ancient Egyptian studies as a facet of a “cultural movement” and “project of continuous research of the past in search of paradigms of thought and practice useful in understanding and improving the present and enhancing the future” (p. 94). In this chapter, a Sankofan approach is apt to examine social processes of navigating identities and engaging civically as disrupting areas of inequality affecting the schooling experiences of immigrant youth from West African countries. We move purposefully from Eurocentric paradigms toward “ways of knowing grounded in making connections” (Flowers, 2003, p. 40) with past, present, and future changing heritage practices and knowledges of immigrant youth.

Data Sources

We conducted a selective review of research literature to examine education research on immigrant youth from West African countries in the United States. We refined our search to review articles published between 2000 and 2016, as nearly half of immigrants from African countries have come to the United States since 2000 (Capps et al., 2011). From 2000 to 2009, the number of “Black African immigrant[s]” in the United States increased 92%, compared to Black Caribbean immigrants growing only 19% (Capps et al., 2011). Also, in 2000, Arthur published Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States, a widely cited text across varied social science disciplines, highlighting ways immigrants in the United States from African countries navigate identities across contexts of families, communities, and work lives. We conducted a search of EBSCO (Education Full Text), ERIC, Scopus, Google Scholar, and JSTOR interdisciplinary electronic databases. We conducted searches of connected keywords including “African” and “immigrant” or “immigration” and “education” or “school” until common literature was found across databases. We focused attention on peer-reviewed, empirical articles with qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research designs. The inclusion of conceptual articles reflects education research only recently beginning to yield empirical articles on educational experiences of immigrant youth from West African countries. We excluded literature focused on studies of immigrant youth across both multiple African countries and the Caribbean (Griffin, Cunningham, & George Mwangi, 2015). We excluded literature giving marginal attention to immigrant youth from West African countries in analysis of educational experiences of immigrant youth and/or youth of color. We excluded literature on immigrant youth from West African countries giving marginal emphasis to youth’s educational experiences. We therefore reviewed articles meeting the following: published since 2000, focused on immigrant youth from West African countries, situated in preK–20 schooling contexts in the United States, and used qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods designs.

In examining immigrant youth from West African countries navigating identities, we drew on 26 articles to examine how immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa countries construct and negotiate complex, multilayered identities within and across varied social and educational contexts such as families, peers, and schools (Alidou, 2000; Awokoya, 2012; Balogun, 2011; Clark, 2008; Dlamini & Anucha, 2009; Harushimana & Awokoya, 2011; Imoagene, 2015; Knight, 2011, 2013; Knight & Watson, 2014; Kumi-Yeboah & Smith, 2016; Masinda et al., 2014; McIntosh Allen, Jackson, & Knight, 2012; Mensah & Williams, 2015; Njue & Retish, 2010; Ogundipe, 2011; Okpalaoka, 2011; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Park, 2013; Roubeni, De Haene, Keatley, Shah, & Rasmussen, 2015; Somé-Guiébré, 2016; Stebleton, 2012; Takyi, 2002; Thomas, 2012; Traoré, 2004, 2008). Articles primarily included research on first- and second-generation Nigerians, as Nigeria is the largest sender of immigrants from West African countries, followed by Ghana (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Zong & Batalova, 2014). In examining immigrant youth engaging civically, we draw on seven articles to construct understandings of the interplay of identities of immigrant youth from West African countries, focused on civic engagement across local knowledges, emerging communicative assets, and lifelong experiences of teaching and learning (Clark, 2008; Jaffee, Watson, & Knight, 2014; Knight, 2011; Knight, Bangura, & Watson, 2012; Knight & Watson, 2014; Takougang, 2003; V. W. M. Watson, Knight, & Jaffee, 2014).

While the positioning of immigrant youth from West African countries as highly educated appears in research literature and popular-media narratives, immigrant youth in research literature grapple with navigating varied shifting identities (Awokoya, 2012; Roubeni et al., 2015), and what it means to engage civically (Knight & Watson, 2014) at a time when education research on immigrant youth from West African countries is only recently beginning to address lived experiences and educational lives of immigrant youth.

Data Analysis

Karenga (2006) notes, Sankofa “is not simply the collection of data but also a critical analysis of meaning from an African-centered standpoint” (p. 413). This review therefore draws on a Sankofan approach, influenced by several orientations toward African consciousness (Temple, 2010), for example, in examining the legacy of cultural and linguistic heritage practices such as language use, and resistance with respect to Eurocentric worldviews of Africa, people of Africa, and immigrant youth from West African countries. We build on and extend understandings of education research examining what teaching and learning may be across experiences of immigrant youth past, present, and to come. A Sankofan approach affords opportunities to look back, consider the present, and engage the future within literature to disrupt polarizing public discourses and challenge inequitable teaching and learning opportunities for immigrant youth from West Africa.

We uploaded articles to Nvivo 10 for data analysis. Literature we reviewed included a range of methodological approaches, including autobiography, observation, census data, field notes, questionnaire, participant writing, interviews, focus group, and case study methodologies. The range of theoretical approaches included autobiographical and conversational (Alidou, 2000), multiple worlds (Awokoya, 2012), culturally relevant theory (McIntosh Allen et al., 2012), and sociocultural perspectives (Park, 2013). We engaged an iterative approach to analysis of research literature (Charmaz, 2006). We constructed in vivo codes. Focused coding and memo writing, in conversation with research questions, involved asking analytic and comparative questions, such as in what ways do immigrant youth from West African countries construct cultural, racial, and/or ethnic identities; how do youth embrace or resist varied identities; and how might varied identities extend views of civic engagement across experiences past, present, and future? We further developed categories, such as “experiencing lifelong learning across communities and families,” “asserting linguistic assets,” and “asserting racialized, ethnic identities across schooling experiences” (see the appendix). Analytic questions emphasized themes from research literature of navigating identities and engaging civically across educational lives of immigrant youth from West African countries.

Authors’ Positionalities

Our varied experiences in teaching and learning extend our approaches and commitments to enacting research focused on immigrant youth from West African countries as a growing immigrant community rendered less visible in education research literature (Knight, Norton, Bentley, & Dixon, 2004; Milner, 2007). The first author identifies as Black; he is of African descent, grew up in the U.S. Northeast, and currently lives and works in a midsized Midwestern metro area. His extended family resides primarily in the U.S. Northeast, and metro Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He taught high school English in Brooklyn, New York, for 12 years, including teaching immigrant youth from Ghana and Nigeria. The second author is of African and European descent; she grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Her initial interest in immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries in New York City emerged through volunteering her research expertise in partnership with community members at the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women. The authors, while not immigrants, in more than 10 years working in research and teaching in New York City, a highly populated immigrant city, continue to seek to contribute to research on the schooling experiences of immigrant youth from West African countries.

Constructing and Negotiating Identities Within and Across Social Contexts

I didn’t have to think about being Black, being African when I was in New York ‘cause I went home [from college] and I spoke Pular all the time. (Alimatu interview, McIntosh Allen et al., 2012, p. 7)

I read his [President Obama’s] book, the first one, Dreams of My Father . . . We share a bicultural background . . . The fact that he had lived in Indonesia and the way that he talked ‘bout it connected to the way that I experienced Nigeria at the age of six. . . . The way class and race and things function very differently, like I’m grateful that I didn’t grow up here [the United States]. I lived from six to fifteen in a Black country. (Ade interview in Knight et al., 2012, p. 143)

Like Alimatu and Ade, the growing presence of immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa in the United States draws attention to complex and multilayered identities they are constructing and negotiating across different yet interrelated educational and social contexts such as families, peers, and schooling. In disrupting the inequalities that immigrants from West African countries face across educational contexts, we must first understand how negotiations of their complex and multilayered identities challenge and, in turn, disrupt dominant public discourses of immigrant youth in the United States and inequitable teaching and learning opportunities.

The notion of identity we explore in this review is based on “a multidimensional, dialectical concept, embodying complex processes” that is “not internal, or self-attributed, but also external or ascribed by others” (Mensah & Williams, 2015, p. 42; see also Vertovec, 2001). Depending on social and educational contexts and relationships within those contexts, some identities of immigrant youth from West African countries were more salient than others. Moreover, several questions emerged as we reviewed literature on roles contexts of families and K–16 schools play in construction and negotiation of identities of immigrant youth from West African countries, and their (in)equitable educational experiences. For example, how can a new interpretive framework trouble negative dominant discourses while seeking to develop new understandings of possible relationships between people of African countries, immigrants from West African countries, African Americans, and Black education (Clark, 2008; Howard, 2013; Ogundipe, 2011; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Traoré, 2008)? How do immigrant youth from West African countries construct their identities while living in close proximity to, and attending school with, African Americans (Awokoya, 2012)? Much of the discourse in educational literatures situates relationships between people of African countries, immigrant youth from African countries, and African Americans in the United States as full of tension and mistrust (Clark, 2008; Imoagene, 2015; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). How do intersections of ethnicity, race, and social class contribute to different understandings of relationships between immigrant youth from West African countries and African Americans (Balogun, 2011)?

In considering Sankofa as an African philosophical approach, and questions emerging in literature, we examine how a more complex rendering of multiple and fluid identities disrupts deficit and simplistic notions of immigrant youth and young adults to portray a more complete understanding of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries. Specifically, we examined messages taught and learned within families, school, and peer contexts to better understand constructions and negotiations of multiple identities of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries, including racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. We consider how immigrant youth and young adults construct, embrace, and question a national and ethnic identity and African American identities and enact multiple identities and fashion linguistic identities within varied contexts. We challenge polarizing views of immigrants; develop new understandings of heterogeneity within Black communities in the United States; and push back against dominant discourses or knowledges surrounding people of Africa, immigrants from African immigrant countries, and African Americans’ educational experiences in U.S. schools (Knight, Roegman, & Edstrom, 2015; Traoré, 2008).

Embracing National and Ethnic Identities Through Family Ties

Family is one of the central contexts in which identities of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries are constructed and negotiated in the United States. Within family contexts, questions about national, ethnic, and racial identity come to the fore. Past and current generations of immigrants from West African countries were both ethnically diverse and the racial majority in their home countries before migrating to the United States (Awokoya, 2012; Clark, 2008; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). Thus, ties to an ethnic identity (e.g., Nigerian, Ghanian) were more prevalent and ties to a racialized identity prior to migrating to the United States were not realized in many of their home countries. Some African premigratory perceptions of African Americans center on stereotypes influenced by negative media depictions of African Americans (Traoré, 2008) as “violent, rude, and on welfare” (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). Messages and expectations about maintaining an African and ethnic identity are taught and reinforced while messages about distancing oneself from African Americans are prevalent. However, more nuanced understandings of immigrant youth and young adults from African countries embracing national and ethnic identities emerged from the literature, especially in relation to their lived proximity to African Americans (Alidou, 2000; Balogun, 2011; Imoagene, 2015; Ogundipe, 2011).

Many African parents living in the United States were, and still are, extremely concerned about their children becoming Americanized, and sought to teach their children about their cultural heritage, language, and values. For example, in McIntosh Allen et al.’s (2012) study, 13 of 17 second- and 1.5-generation participants from eight countries in West Africa (Camerron, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone) who spoke English noted how uses of their Indigenous language enabled them to sustain connections to heritages of their West African countries. Speaking heritage languages connected them to their nationality and ethnicity and in many ways insulated them from feeling marginalized in other places.

Parents also tended to emphasize their ethnicity and nationality as one strategy used to de-emphasize their race and discrimination toward them. Many sought to distance themselves from African Americans in terms of racial hierarchy in the United States, and assimilation with African Americans involving downward mobility (Imoagene, 2015; Ogundipe 2011). Living in close proximity to African Americans also caused many parents to fear their children would adopt U.S. African American cultural values and mannerisms (Awokoya, 2012; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). However, society within the United States does not always distinguish between the two groups as a result of racism and discrimination.

In particular, Awokoya’s (2012) study of 12 1.5- and second-generation Nigerian college students within metropolitan Washington, D.C., revealed how their parents emphasized importance of cultural norms and traditions and expressed a desire for their children to view themselves as ethnically Yoruba or Igbo, Nigerian, or “at the very least African” (p. 265). Nigerian parents did not want their children to adopt behaviors they associated with African Americans and viewed as problematic as a result of the media or personal interactions, such as criminal behavior and a lack of academic achievement. These young adults also reflected on their parents not helping them negotiate their “Nigerianness” and Blackness simultaneously although they were experiencing their ethnic and racial identities together. Instead, emphasis from their parents was on either being Black—and as a Black person they were expected to work harder than their White and African American peers in order to be successful—or being Nigerian and upholding their Nigerian cultural values.

In addition to family playing a central role in the construction of a national and ethnic identity, a variety of factors emerged and merged in dynamic ways across the lifespan of 1.5- and second-generation immigrants, such that immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries viewed themselves as “African” (Clark, 2008). For example, Clark (2008) noted that second-generation immigrants who identified with national identities of West African countries were rooted in African countries such as Nigeria; they were members of African student organizations, they socialized with other Nigerians and West Africans, their family community involvement was in an African country, they tended to reject an African American identity, and they married people of African descent. Interestingly, Stebleton (2012) argued that most “African immigrants want to be identified as African” (p. 54).

Questioning an African and Ethnic Identity in Varied Peer Contexts

Within varied peer groups, immigrant youth from West African countries negotiate being too African, not Black enough, or not African enough. They have to prove their “Africanness,” especially if they do not speak an African language and spoke English without an accent (Awokoya, 2012; Clark, 2008). Awokoya’s (2012) study found that 1.5- and second-generation Nigerians were teased and ridiculed for being African because of negative views many of their peers had of them. As a consequence, they tried to downplay their heritage and assert a more Americanized identity. African American peers challenged Nigerian youth and young adults’ notions of Blackness, and how, for example, Blackness was not simply a function of skin color but also about how to walk, talk, and interact with other African American peers. Immigrant youth from Nigeria who were most successful in middle and high school were able to “code switch” (p. 272) and use the language and social behaviors of their African American peers. However, co-ethnic Nigerians also challenged their Nigerian identities, and whether they were “African” enough if they had been born in the United States, spoke with an American accent, and had African American friends. Struggling to understand how they did not look African, or being subjected to be the authentic Nigerian, they found themselves questioning their ethnic authenticity. Surprisingly, only Park’s (2013) study addressed these complex relationships. In the study, Tara, a young African women from Guinea, lived in an urban neighborhood with Mexican and Mexican American youth. Tara was bullied by several Mexican and Mexican American youth, which caused her to leave her local soccer club. Thus, in these studies on constructions and negotiations of identities within peer contexts, African Americans, co-ethnic Nigerians, and Mexican and Mexican American peers challenged immigrant youth from West African countries to negotiate their national and ethnic identities, and what constitutes an authentic African or Nigerian identity across educational and social contexts.

Resisting Imposed Depictions of an African and Ethnic Identity in Schools

Schooling contexts are contested terrain for many immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries as they construct and negotiate their complex, multilayered identities. In particular, the curriculum and teachers’ pedagogical practices shaped perceptions immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa held of themselves and their interactions with African American students. They were challenged in constructing a positive national and racial identity, navigating negative depictions of “Africans” within K–12 schooling context, being “African ambassadors,” and contending with the model Black minority myth. Their negotiations were mediated by colonizing knowledges of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries and African Americans highlighting stereotypic constructions of both groups.

The knowledges embedded within the curriculum play a pivotal role in shaping identities of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries. Unfortunately, curriculum continues to uphold colonizing knowledge and negative stereotypical images of Africans as primitive, diseased, poor, and coming from a “Dark Continent” (Traoré, 2008, p. 12; see also Harushimana & Awokoya, 2011; Okpalaoka, 2011). These stereotypes led many immigrant youth from West African countries to downplay their national and ethnic identities. These negative images also affected academic achievement and relationships with their African American peers. In Kumi-Yeboah and Smith’s study (2016) of 60 first-generation Ghanaian youth and young adults, youth assert negative portrayals of Africans in the curriculum made them feel “their identities as students from a part of Africa were negated and they lost a sense of self” (p. 12). Meanwhile, their African American peers were negotiating their understandings of Africa, people of Africa, and immigrants from countries in Africa through this same colonizing framing and, in turn, may distance themselves from immigrant youth and negative depictions of immigrant youth’s culture within the curriculum (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). Similarly, Traoré’s (2004) research with 15 newly arrived immigrants from African countries emphasized how a colonial curriculum led to “suppression and distortion of African culture, language and contributed to negative relationships with African American students” (p. 349).

However, tensions created between immigrant youth from West Africa and African American students are further heightened through teachers’ pedagogical practices. For example, in Awokoya’s (2012) study, teachers’ pedagogical practices among 1.5- and second-generation Nigerians and their African American peers facilitated the notion of the model Black minority myth. Nigerian immigrant youth who were in honors classes had to negotiate their roles as African ambassadors and being the good Black student who represented the entire continent of Africa, while African American students were depicted in disparaging ways. Therefore, contradictory messages of the model Black minority and negative stereotypical curricular images affected both Nigerian students and African Americans in negative ways. Moreover, Imoagene’s (2015) study of 75 second-generation Nigerian students found every participant experienced discrimination in ethnic slurs such as “African booty scratcher” (p. 180), leaving African students struggling with what it meant to have Black skin but be different from their Black peers. Tensions were further heightened between immigrant youth from West Africa and African Americans they perceived as not knowing much about the heritage of their West African home countries. Slurs were drawn from popular-media images of both groups and used against both groups, to further create boundaries between them.

These studies emphasize how youth become marginalized by and from their peers, and how misperceptions of both African cultures and African American culture are sustained. In particular, immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa countries negotiate negative curricular images of people from Africa, and teaching and learning experiences do not address who they are and their heritage practices such as Indigenous knowledges and cultural ways of knowing (Dei, 2002). Traoré’s (2008) more recent research findings focus on how on a shared cultural heritage within the curriculum can serve as a mediator of “myths, misperceptions, or stereotypes” (p. 12) of people from Africa and African Americans, and contribute to more positive relationships between them.

Embracing and/or Resisting African American Identities Across Multiple Contexts

Much of the discourse in educational literature situates the relationship between people of Africa, immigrants to the United States from African countries, and African Americans in the United States as full of tension (Clark, 2008; Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012). As noted in the previous section, this relationship is mediated by colonizing cultural knowledges and images of immigrant youth from West Africa and African Americans highlighting stereotypic constructions of both groups. This knowledge shapes perceptions of themselves and interactions with one another.

In the midst of this sociocultural and educational context, researchers examined how and why immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa embraced and resisted an African American identity. For example, Clark (2008) noted second-generation immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries who identified as African Americans lost their accents, adopted African American values, had family involvement in the African American community, and lived in more rural areas or small cities. Moreover, Awokoya (2012) argued although some immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa identified as African, they were constantly negotiating an African American identity ascribed to them by others in and outside of school contexts due to their phenotype and lack of an accent.

Immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa in McIntosh Allen et al.’s (2012) work created a hybrid notion of cultural identity and considered themselves both “African” and American. They expressed pride in how their home countries and the United States shaped their ideologies and identification after living in the United States for several years. Embracing both identities challenged the dichotomy defining cultural identities as in opposition to one another.

Enacting Multiple, Fluid Black Situated Identities

Immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa hold multiple Black identities simultaneously, and particular Black identities are more salient in some contexts versus others (Awokoya, 2012; Balogun, 2011; Knight, 2011). These identities reflect Sankofan practices stressing interrelatedness of past, present, and future. For example, Okpalaoka (2011) called attention to the fluid identities of immigrant girls from West Africa as they chose contexts in which to associate or disassociate from ascribed and debilitating stereotyped meanings of being African or African American by each group. For example, they identified as Ghanaian across Ghanaian settings and African American when associating with African American peers. Immigrant youth’s fluid identities provide support for integrating varied contexts they will also find themselves in the future. Moreover, in Clark’s (2008) study, second-generation immigrant youth from West Africa who navigated multiple identities were simultaneously raised in African communities, and listened to multiple languages in the home while also listening to Black Entertainment Television. They did not have an accent and were knowledgeable about both communities. For example, a U.S.-born college freshman of Nigerian parents living in Houston, Texas, and having a southern accent, identified as Nigerian American and African American.

Balogun (2011) challenged conventional notions that second-generation, middle-class Nigerians in the United States do not want to embrace a Black racial identity in order to separate from downwardly mobile African Americans. Rather, she emphasized how second-generation middle-class Nigerians identify and associate with middle-class African Americans in sharing a culture of upward mobility in college, thereby negotiating tensions between Black Nigerian and American identities. Balogun also offered insights into ways Nigerian students in predominantly White colleges aligned with other Black students on campus as they shared a context of racial discrimination, which in turn shaped how they embraced their racial identity, as in many cases they were perceived as African American. However, on historically Black campuses, they emphasized their ethnic Nigerian identity within the larger Black population. Their ethnic Nigerian identity was also strengthened through transnational ties while sojourning back to Nigeria for visits with family and charity work.

In a qualitative case study of Kwame, an immigrant youth from Ghana, Knight (2011) drew attention to the birthing of his dual citizenship as he negotiated his multiple identities as Ghanaian and American. Kwame shared the following:

My Ghanaian identity will never leave me. [. . .] It will always be with me and my kids when I have one someday, and being American is who I am now. I feel, because my understand the way I see the world [. . .] is Ghanaian but American made. (Knight, 2011, p. 1279)

Kwame’s negotiations afford opportunities for educators to see how multiple identities and allegiances are forged rather than ascribing to notions that immigrant youth from West Africa must belong to one country or the other.

Fashioning Black Identities Through Language

Language use by immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa mediate connections to home countries and cultural identities as well as academic literacies in K–12 public schools. While educational issues regarding English language learners in the United States have received significant attention in the literature of academic achievement of immigrant children of Latino and Asian backgrounds, literature on heritage practices such as language use of immigrant children from West African countries is sparse.

Connecting to Cultural and Linguistic Identities

In McIntosh Allen et al.’s (2012) study of 18 immigrant youth and young adults from West Africa, participants all spoke English and used Indigenous languages such as Pular and Twi to sustain connections to home countries and negotiate their K–16 schooling experiences. They sought to “affirm, develop or negotiate their cultural identities and viewed their ability to speak their mother tongue as an asset worth maintaining” (p. 9). Jake, a Ghanaian participant, attributed his ability to speak Twi, albeit with an American accent, to his ability to sustain connections to his Ghanaian and West African identities. Clark (2008) also argued that immigrant youth from West Africa in her study who spoke English without an accent were simultaneously ascribed an African American identity while negating African identities. In so doing, they were troubling the privilege of speaking English without an accent and (in)visibility of Indigenous languages and knowledges. Okpalaoka and Dillard (2012) noted one female Nigerian expressed pride in her heritage and had an “advantage” over classmates because she spoke a language other than English. Interestingly, the role of an accent or lack thereof contributed to struggles over identity constructions. For example, second-generation immigrants from West Africa who identified with national and ethnic identities, or who were raised in small towns, resisted an ascribed African American identity as they did not speak English with an accent. These studies on language use offer compelling insights into intertwining heritage practices in supporting linguistic and cultural identities of immigrant youth from West Africa.

Promoting Academic Literacies

Park (2013) studied multilingual academic literacy practices of one adolescent female immigrant from Sierra Leone and Guinea. The young woman, Tara, spoke Krio, French, and English while living in Guinea. Park noted Tara’s high academic achievement could be attributed to attendance at an English-dominant speaking school in Africa, and her high proficiency in English before coming to the United States, which allowed Tara to incorporate her learning experiences in Guinea and the United States. Using the dual frame of reference of Tara’s heritage practices served as an entry point into varied literacy assignments in the United States. For example, she incorporated the value of memorization and reading comprehension as part of her integrated literacy practice. Tara’s dual frame of references for learning academic literacy points to ways teachers can leverage students’ heritage practices and Indigenous knowledges as frames of references they bring to school-based learning. Few studies focus on immigrant students from West Africa who arrive speaking multiple languages from their home countries, and ways their language and literacy practices are supported in K–12 classrooms (Somé-Guiébré, 2016). While Somé-Guiébré’s (2016) study of two immigrant young girls from West Africa highlights uses of speaking French and Lingala in their fifth-grade classroom, English Language and content teachers were not equipped with knowledge of how to build on home languages as heritage practices to support academic literacies. More studies are needed that focus on linguistic assets and uses of assets of immigrant youth from West Africa in supporting cultural and linguistic identities, and ways multiple linguistic strengths can be supported and leveraged to support promotion of academic literacies in school.

Complicating Civic Engagement

Considerations of civic engagement, taking place as recent political debates in the United States, turn on contested notions of immigration, citizenship status, and what it may mean to be civically engaged. For example, as we write, comprehensive immigration reform resounds as a primary issue debated in the U.S. presidential election. As researchers expand understandings of what counts as civic engagement (Jensen, 2008; Kahne & Sporte, 2008; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004), varied cultural norms and citizenship statuses bring further complexities and prompt new understandings of civic engagement of immigrant youth across contexts local and global (Abu El-Haj, 2011). Specifically, we examine ways in which immigrant youth from West African countries complicate evolving heritage practices and local knowledges as enactments of civic engagement; and in their civic engagement demonstrate already-present active citizenship across contexts meaningful to youth.

Complicating Local Knowledges as Enacting Civic Engagement

For some immigrant youth from West African countries, civic participation underscores and extends a notion of active citizenship (Avoseh, 2001). Henry, highlighted in Clark’s (2008) research, moved from Kenya to the New York City area at 9 years old. Henry was born to Kenyan parents, and identifies as “African” (p. 176). However, as Clark (2008) notes, Henry, at 17, participates civically in the African American community—as a “more active” participant than the “African community” (p. 176). For Henry, a tension emerges between his participation across African American and Kenyan communities, and his citizenship status. As Henry is not a U.S. citizen, he seeks not to “claim” (p. 176) an African American identity. Yet Henry notes community members position him as African American as he engages civically at the community level. Henry’s civic participation underscores and extends a notion of active citizenship (Avoseh, 2001) across which members of a community take on roles as learners, notably outside of formal schooling contexts (C. Lee, 2009). In doing so, Henry engages actively in the African American community, different than his parents, who, while not active in the African American community, are “very active” in the Kenyan community in both Kenya and the United States (p. 176). However, Henry, in enrolling in a historically Black university in the United States, took “more of an interest in Africa” (p. 176), underscoring a notion of active citizenship as participating across both immigrant youth’s West African countries, and African American lived experiences.

Immigrant youth from West African countries demonstrate a complexity of experiences as they enact civic stances important to their understandings and meaning making of affiliations, highlighting the urgency of local knowledges and complex identities toward civic engagement. Moreover, for immigrant youth, moving across new, formal, and informal schooling spaces ushers forward emerging local knowledges, complicating an interplay of past, present, and future experiences of teaching and learning (Dlamini & Anucha, 2009). For example, in Knight’s (2011) work, the “global lifestyle and civic engagement” (p. 1275) of Kwame, a 23-year-old transnational immigrant youth, provide further insight into how immigrant youth from West African countries construct, navigate, and contest norms of citizenship. Moreover, Knight demonstrates how Kwame extends K–16 civic learning opportunities, using news technologies toward civic engagement. For example, the Internet provides Kwame opportunities to contribute civically and politically in local, national, and global areas through messaging, blogs, or news websites including BBC. Enactment of technologies galvanizes new forms of peer-to-peer interactions toward political action. In this way, Kwame further complicates local knowledges as he asserts new understandings as salient issues and questions pertaining to immigrant civic life within varied teaching and learning environments, and across local/global contexts.

Immigrant youth from West African countries further negotiate emerging civic identities as local knowledges facilitated across participatory new media technologies spanning global and local contexts on- and off-line. For example, V. W. M. Watson et al. (2014) note “social-civic” literacies as understandings and enactments of political literacy, and constructing civic identities for immigrant youth and young adults. Youth use social media as emergent opportunities binding notions of schools and community, and understandings of past, present, and teaching-and-learning to come, as youth across geographic boundaries of the United States and West African countries enact roles in an engaged global society, civically learning and participating toward human rights stances (Jaffee et al., 2014; Knight, 2011).

Demonstrating Already-Present Active Citizenship Across Contexts Meaningful to Youth

Across several studies, Knight and colleagues drew on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to contest deficit views of civic life of immigrant youth from West African countries and highlight civic assets many immigrant youth bring to varied schooling experiences (Knight, 2011; Knight et al., 2012; Knight & Watson, 2014; V. W. M. Watson et al., 2014). The already-present civic assets of immigrant youth from West African countries challenge traditional notions of civic engagement prioritizing onetime activities, such as voting, which render immigrant youth who may not be permanent residents and cannot vote, and youth under age 18, as not engaged in civic action (Chareka & Sears, 2006; Knight & Watson, 2014). Moreover, immigrant youth from West African countries enact local knowledges toward civic engagement as participatory in different ways. For example, local knowledges take place against backdrops of lived experiences such as cultural and religious events, yet also across social, online communities as networks across the United States, Canada, or immigrant youth’s West African countries (Chareka & Sears, 2006; V. W. M. Watson et al., 2014). Knight and Watson (2014), for instance, render visible a multitiered view of civic teaching, learning, and action of immigrant youth from West African countries, extending within and across past, present, and futures, and participatory communal contexts of families, identities, and schooling in the United States and Africa. In this way, immigrant youth from West African countries are constructing and reimagining an “action-oriented global worldview of cosmopolitan citizenship” (Jaffee et al., 2014, p. 1) across which to rethink civic engagement involving social justice issues in the United States and globally. Immigrant youth attending to but also building on and remaking local knowledge, identities, and attachments enact complex identities toward, in, and as a return to youth’s communities in the United States, and West African countries.

Examining Complex Identities in Research

The extent to which immigrant’s identity constructions are continuously shaped and being reshaped living in the “new African Diaspora” (Gordon, 1998) needs to be examined as the population continues to grow across the United States. For example, research is needed on complex identities and meanings of Blackness for immigrant youth from varied countries in West Africa, such as Cape Verde (Sánchez Gibau, 2005; Saucier, 2015). Moreover, researchers may note immigrant youth’s specific West African countries in future research, disrupting homogenizing notions of a monolithic West Africa, to more fully render visible heritage practices, ethnic, and language variations of a diverse continent of 54 countries (Kamya, 1997). It is also important to understand how varied identity constructions of immigrant youth from West African countries influence negative nationalist sentiments regarding immigrants and immigration.

Future research on Black immigrants from African countries should explore different national and ethnic origins of newer Black populations, and examine various factors shaping their identities. Several questions arising from the literature on families as an influential context for identity construction and negotiation of immigrant youth from West African countries, especially Nigerian contexts, point to a need for further research. For example, consideration may be given to roles reunification plays in family contexts, and how identity is thereby constructed and negotiated. Furthermore, future research may offer nuanced treatments of variation in identity across ethnic groups who share similar class backgrounds (Balogun, 2011), and how notions of identity affect educational and social relationships across immigrant youth, African Americans, and other ethnic groups with whom immigrant youth live in close proximity. Future research may furthermore study youth patterns of identity construction and negotiations, how immigrant youth self-identity, and how and why youth develop varied social relationships illuminating notions of belonging and marginalization.

“Talking Back” to Schooling as Envisioning Varied Research on Teaching and Learning

“Talking back” to schooling influences that perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes of diverse populations, shape negative identity constructions, and marginalize heritage practices and local, cultural knowledges requires challenging inequitable teaching and learning practices taking place within schools. For example, Joyce King (1992) argued for a “Diaspora literacy” taking into account Black people’s multiple identities, and a “human consciousness to take back one’s humanity from destructive views of “Blackness” (p. 319). Specifically, Busia (1989) describes “Diaspora literacy” as an “ability to read a variety of cultural signs of the lives of African children at home and in the ‘new World’” (as cited in King, 1992, p. 318). With inclusion of such practices, distortions of and inequalities within and among such Black racial groups as people of Africa, immigrants from West African countries, and African Americans may be challenged and addressed. Moreover, racial and social dynamics accompanying immigrant youth from West African countries hold definite implications for their academic and social school experiences.

Research is furthermore needed with preservice teachers, and collaborators working with teachers, across professional development for teachers, staff, and community collaborators to challenge stereotypes in the curriculum and classrooms. Such further research may consider more nuanced understandings of multiple and varied experiences and perspectives of immigrant youth from West African countries across schooling contexts. Research is also needed in demonstrating roles of educators in fostering connections and learning, for example, across contexts where tensions exist between immigrant youth from West African countries and African American youth. Further research may consider teaching and learning at a time of mutual stereotyping of both groups in the curriculum. Additional research could explicitly address tensions in examining dominant public discourses such as popular-media narratives and images of Africans and African Americans (Traoré & Lukens, 2006) as integral aspects of schooling and postsecondary contexts.

While literature on immigrant youth speaks to emergent bilinguals and literacy practices (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010), there is scant research involving multiple language use and literacies of immigrant youth of West African countries (Davila, 2015; Park, 2013) and how interplays of youth’s linguistic identities, heritage practices, and local and cultural knowledges are supported in schools.

Extending Varied Research Approaches

In understanding how varied research design opens up new avenues of inquiry, there is a need for multiple types of research design, including participatory research methodologies, quantitative and mixed-methods research approaches, and longitudinal research studies, to examine experiences of immigrant youth from West African countries, and static notions of Black identities and civic teaching and learning. Moreover, while this review focused on immigrant youth from West African countries in the United States, as contexts of migration call attention to possibilities for a global citizenship education (Banks, 2004), further empirical studies are needed building on literature on immigrant youth from West African countries globally (e.g., Beaman, 2012; Bitew & Ferguson, 2010, 2011; Chareka & Sears, 2006; Dlamini & Anucha, 2009; Hatoss, 2012; Masinda et al., 2014; Usman, 2012).

Toward Research and Teaching With African Immigrant Youth as Civic Imaginaries

We enacted a Sankofan approach to analyze education research literature on social processes of navigating identities and engaging civically across immigrant youth’s heritage practices and Indigenous knowledges. In disrupting areas of inequalities affecting educational experiences of immigrant youth, we ask how researchers, policymakers, and educators, as collaborators in educational lives of immigrant youth, may—as Nigerian poet Tanure Ojaide (2015) notes—“imbued with experience of the past [. . .] lead to the future by offering a vision of possibilities” (p. 50). A Sankofan approach points to possibilities of envisioning past, present, and future strengths as heritage practices and knowledges immigrant youth from West African countries bring to classrooms and communities. Moreover, at a time of polarizing popular-media narratives in dominant public discourses of immigrant youth from West African countries, a Sankofan approach asserts possibilities of youth enacting “civic imaginaries” (V. W. M. Watson & Marciano, 2015, p. 39) “across which ‘discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather as seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world’ (Fairclough, 2003, p. 124)” (V. W. M. Watson & Marciano, 2015, p. 39). Fairclough (2003) further notes discourses as

ways of representing aspects of the world— the processes, relations, and structures of the material world, the “mental world” of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth, and the social world. [. . .] Discourses [are] tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions. (p. 124)

DeChaine (2009), writing in communication studies, draws on rhetoric of contemporary bordering practices on the U.S.–Mexico border to contextualize “struggles over the boundaries of citizenship” as both enabling and constraining a “civic imaginary” and reconsidering of geographical borders as “performative, sociocultural productions” (p. 45; see also DeJaeghere & McCleary, 2010). In envisioning immigrant youth from West African countries as enacting civic imaginaries, researchers, policymakers, and educators as collaborators in the lives of youth position immigrant youth as participants and contributors, simultaneously extending possibilities and meanings of negotiating identities and engaging civically in schools and communities in the United States, and youth’s home countries, across experiences past, present, and to come. We ask how may further research with immigrant youth from West African countries build on and extend understandings of the multitude and heterogeneity of their educational experiences, given ways in which immigrant youth are viewed in polarizing ways in dominant public discourses such as popular-media narratives (Egbedi, 2016). Such work as envisioning civic imaginaries of immigrant youth in research and teaching is particularly needed today, in disrupting inequitable educational experiences of schooling of immigrant youth from West African countries, living and learning in the United States.