**** Atlantic Substrate models: problems of strong form
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As Atlantic creole cultures were formed, the most general and universal shared traits within a group were often chosen whenever power relations failed to impose a default. This allowed a culture to be shared by the greatest number of members of the slave community. This pressure toward the shared is what caused Africanisms to be pan-African or larger in the scope of their generality, and one result of it is that Africanisms categorically meet and overlap with features considered by others to be universals.
A close examination of the possibilities of a pan-Africanist substrate raises difficult issues. Once a trait in question becomes common to an area as large west and central Africa combined, what ties are left in common? Two quickly come to mind. The fact that the vast majority of African immigrants came here bound under slavery is one. Skin color is the other. If backers of the substratist (Herskovits) thesis reject the notion that the institution of slavery destroyed all African cultural continuities, and the continuities to be found are pan-African then the only tie that binds the continent together that is discrete from globally-distributed traits is a physical construct of race.
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As a result, a non-synthetic substratist position becomes one of two things: it may either adopt an implicit belief in physically-determined cultural traits, or it may entail the continued loss of agency on the part of members of the substrate. In regard to the first position, 'the belief in inherent cultural differences based on skin color' makes a racialist ideology. By "racialist," I mean a racist ideology whose holders do not necessarily have the power to impose it on others. This is obviously unacceptable. Alternately, a non-synthetic substratist stance could be a definition formed solely in reaction to empowered racism. By this I am referring to the Gramsciian construct of hegemony--resistance and accommodation. Such a position relinquishes culpability for racialism on the part of the substrate, but in so doing, constructs that substrate solely as a reaction, completely formed by European agency--the very idea substratists seek to overturn.
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Three strategies have been adopted to sidestep these implications: synthesis with universalist positions, overgeneralization, and genealogy. The first has been often-called for, but little has come of the calls as far as a solid, workable methodolgy is concerned. The other two are often tacitly adopted. In overgeneralization, substratists draw a line of attribution between African features, which are allowed, and universal features, which are restricted or denied. The former is assumed unexamined; the latter is justified on the grounds of a form of Whorfian cultural relativism, which, paradoxically, coexists with presumptions of intersubjectivity within a particular community, however it is bounded. In a genealogy, the scholar makes one-to-one comparisons of creole and source ethnicities, disregarding all other possibilities. This has been done for both superstrate and substrate positions.