The Tangled Business of Diaspora-Making

Since the inception of the field of African diaspora studies, its scholars have called attention to the many routes of travel and communication that constitute the strands from which the whole is woven. It has necessarily been a work of empirical recovery of far-flung histories that the archive captures only peripherally and, though there has been much focus on interactions between the African continent and its diasporas, relationships between diaspora communities abroad have also been the subject of vigorous scholarship. For a diaspora that shared no common homeland aside from a vast continent, and no common religion or language, the process of creating bonds of identity, affinity, and political solidarity within its inherent diversity has long been of major interest. In one of her last essays, pioneer diaspora scholar Ruth Sims Hamilton called for a focus on “the ‘crosspoints,’ ‘active sites,’ and contradictions . . . that not only facilitate the emergence and development of a collective ‘we’ but also effectuate major dynamics within and among people of the diaspora” (Hamilton 2007, 8)

Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Homeland · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Solidarity · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies