This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere. Ellis locates these phenomena in the works of C.L.R. James, the testy encounter between George Lamming and James Baldwin at the 1956 Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris, the elusiveness of the queer diasporic subject in Andrew Salkey's novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, and the trope of spirit possession in Nathaniel Mackey's writing and Burning Spear's reggae. Ellis' use of queer and affect theory shows how geographies claim diasporic subjects in ways that nationalist or masculinist tropes can never fully capture. Diaspora, Ellis concludes, is best understood as a mode of feeling and belonging, one fundamentally shaped by the experience of loss.

This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

When one thinks of African diasporas, it is likely that their mind will automatically drift to locations such as Europe and America. But how much is known about the African diaspora in East Asia and, in particular, within China, where race is such a politically sensitive topic? Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in China and Nigeria, Mapping the New African Diaspora in China explores a new wave of African migration to South China in the context of the expansion of Sino/African trade relations and the global circulation of racial knowledge. Indeed, grassroots perspectives of China/Africa trade relations are foregrounded through the examination of daily interactions between Africans and rural-to-urban Chinese migrants in various informal trade spaces in Guangzhou. These Afro-Chinese encounters have the potential to not only help reveal the negotiated process of mutual racial learning, but also to subvert hegemonic discourses such as Sino/African friendship and white supremacy in subtle ways. However, as Lan demonstrates within this enlightening volume, the transformative power of such cross-cultural interactions is severely limited by language barrier, cultural differences, and the Chinese state’s stringent immigration control policies. This book will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of China/Africa relations, race and ethnic studies, globalization and transnational migration, and urban China studies, as well as those from other social science disciplines such as political science, international relations, urban geography, Asian Studies, African studies, sociology, development studies, and cross-cultural communication studies. It may also appeal to policymakers and non-profit organizations involved in providing services and assistance to migrant populations.

Campt explores the affective resonances of two archives of Black European photographs for those pictured, their families, and the community. Image Matters looks at photograph collections of four Black German families taken between 1900 and the end of World War II and a set of portraits of Afro-Caribbean migrants to Britain taken at a photographic studio in Birmingham between 1948 and 1960.

Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the cold war fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows Geschiere to examine the emotional appeal of autochthony—as well as its dubious historical basis—and to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.

This is an ambitious and brilliant book by one of Africa''s leading diaspora intellectuals. A combination of a researcher''s field notes, a travelogue and personal memoir, it is unusual in African writing. It is the first book by an African scholar to take us on such an amazing analytical and narrative journey in search of African diasporas around the world from Latin America to the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. It is filled with analytical insights, captivating stories, and intriguing observations on the complex histories and experiences of African diasporas, their triumphs and tragedies, perils and possibilities, and their enduring struggles for belonging, for their humanity. Its inimitable passions are leavened by engaging humor, its scholarly analyses by a novelist''s eye for local context and color. The author seeks to address the perplexing question of what it means to be a person of African descent living outside of the African continent. He offers the reader fascinating and richly textured portraits and surveys of the diversity of diasporic lives as well as the abiding connections of the diaspora condition. What makes this book particularly gripping are the multilayered narratives, the braided stories and explorations of African diasporic lives across many contexts and places as well as the author''s own life during the period of his travels from 2006 to 2009. Also skillfully interwoven are the author''s daily encounters and observations, information and reflections from interviewees from all walks of life, and the larger structural contexts of diaspora struggles for enfranchisement and empowerment. For all the gruesome exclusions, vulnerabilities, and marginalities African diasporas have suffered in their various abodes, this is a remarkable tale of diasporic agency, a celebration of their lasting contributions to the construction of the modern world in all its manifestations. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has been thinking about and living with pan-Africanism and Diaspora before its second wave of popularity and has done the experiential and intellectual work. In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters takes us with him as he documents the existence of our various journeys and arrivals, and the ways we re-create and redefine an African world wherever we are. As we read this book, we are able to travel with Zeleza from Venezuela to Oman, across the Caribbean and throughout Europe, getting the flavors and colors of the African Diaspora in myriad locations." -- Carole Boyce Davies, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Cornell University, General Editor, Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora "For over a century, we have been flooded with Black American narratives of returning to Africa. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, a distinguished African scholar, reverses the poles and seeks to discover the global diaspora--the descendants of slaves, migrant laborers, refugees, fortune seekers. Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, part critical interrogation, Zeleza has given us a brilliant compendium of richly detailed and astute insights into how contemporary black intellectuals and activists understand racism and blackness, and how the black world sees itself, its relationship to Africa, and the future. From Latin America to the Arab world, Europe to the sub-continent, Zeleza''s fascinating journey takes place against a backdrop of globalization, growing divisions between rich and poor, ever greater displacement, heightened nationalism, and a genuine debate over the effectiveness of global black unity. Yet, as with Richard Wrights traveling observations a half-century earlier, Zeleza never avoids the hard questions or the difficult truths. A stunning achievement." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California "In Search of African Diasporas offers a landmark contribution to the growing scholarly inquest into the African Diaspora. Based on years of travel, discussion and reading, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza presents a veritable tour-de-force, generating an utterly unique account that fuses his travelogue of a modern Diasporic odyssey with a penetrating analysis that both interprets the Diaspora''s larger meaning, while also inhabiting its migratory flows. Highly readable, perceptively written, geographically broad, and refreshingly critical, Zeleza''s 21st century rendition of the timeless''travel diary'' is sure to set the bar for those who are attempting to grapple with questions of identity, culture, and society in a fast-paced world of global change. Yet, anchored in history, this book is as much an artifact of the African Diaspora, as it is a current reflection on this persistently enduring modern phenomenon." -- Ben Vinson III, Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of Latin American History, Johns Hopkins University, Author of Flight: A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico, and African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean "A groundbreaking and powerful look at the African Diaspora in the world. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza''s existentialist commentary on multiple African Diasporas reminds the reader of Richard Wright''s Black Power in reverse: sincere, intimate and controversial. The novelistic descriptions of people and places also recalls some of the best travel narratives of Ryszard Kapuściński." -- Manthia Diawara, Professor of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies, New York University, author of African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics "Africa''s memory and relationship with its diaspora is a troubled one, a mixture of ignorance, stereotype, sentimentality, alienation, admiration and distortions. All this is compounded by the fact that Africans have themselves not sought direct knowledge of its Diasporas. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza''s book is an authoritative contribution to the initiation of Africa''s own exploration of whatever happened to its descendants outside the continent and how they are faring today. It is a tour de force that combines the aesthetic sensibilities and descriptive force of a novelist and essayist that Zeleza is and the scholarly authority of a renowned African historian. The result is a fascinating encounter with Africa''s Diaspora in the many places he visited. It is a gripping distillation of anecdote, personal reflections and analysis. Zeleza is an erudite traveler and thoroughly reliable guide whose account opens new vistas to the lives of Africa''s dispersed descendants. The book is a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand the complex outcomes of the Presence Africaine in the world." -- Professor Thandika Mkandawire, former Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Chair in African Development at the London School of Economics, University of London "...an engaging global history of African diasporas...A fine read for lower-level undergraduates first encountering diaspora studies...Summing Up: Highly recommended" -- CHOICE Magazine "...Zeleza writes with admirable clarity...in choosing to share the interactions of his fieldwork in this travel diary, Zeleza has produced a bold, challenging work..." -- Studies in Travel Writing