Through the research and experiences of 16 scholars whose native homes span ten countries, this collection shifts the discussion of belonging and affinity within Africa and its diaspora toward local perceptions and the ways in which these notions are asserted or altered.

Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

The third edition of Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora is an update of the second edition (1998) and incorporates new chapters that include expanded coverage of issues on women, health, terrorism, the African Union, and many others, as well as the most recent theories and methods in Africana studies. To date, Africana Studies remains the most comprehensive and most suitable text for both teachers and students interested in Africa and the Diaspora in the US, the Caribbean, Afro-Latin-America, and elsewhere. The book is divided into five parts: the state of the art of Africana studies; the evolution of the history of black people; analysis of the contributions of the black world; the present and future status of these peoples; and the societies and values of black people. The book also includes a chronology of significant events in the history of peoples of African descent and a number of maps. "[This book] attempts in one volume to present more accurately the experiences and contributions of the African world. It introduces readers to the most comprehensive account of black interdisciplinary subjects to date and summarizes the research of specialists in a variety of fields... The number of contributors, variety, and depth of coverage show that the work was carefully thought out." -- Insights, on an earlier edition

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject African Studies - African diaspora, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Faculty of Social Sciences), course: History, language: English, abstract: The term “Diaspora” simply means a dispersion of a people, language or culture that was formerly concentrated in one place. But adding “Africa” to the term makes it complicated and difficult to define because of the way the African diaspora occurred and controversies among scholars in defining who an African is. This complexity raises questions such as is an African solely a black person, or is it someone who traces his descent to the continent and the ultimate question of whether Africans see themselves as one people or align themselves to their respective ethnic groups and to some extent their countries. The complications is further heightened by how various authors conceptualize the African Diaspora. The Atlantic model which dominates the African Diaspora popularized by Paul Gilroy tries to shift focus and attention on the forced migration of West Africans from 16th Century to the 19th Century as slaves to the new world. Scholars such as Zeleza therefore argues that there is the need to “de-Atlanticize and de-Americanize the histories of African diasporas” and identifies three main sets of African Diaspora namely the trans-Indian Ocean diasporas, trans-Mediterranean diasporas, and trans-Atlantic diasporas. These sets of African Diaspora have their own histories and their differences and similarities between them making it more difficult to conceptualize the African Diaspora as referring to one event. This essay therefore seeks to explain how the complications in conceptualizing the African Diaspora stretches across time, space, class and gender.

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

DIVA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany./div