Global Africa is a striking, original volume that disrupts the dominant narratives that continue to frame our discussion of Africa, complicating conventional views of the region as a place of violence, despair, and victimhood. The volume documents the significant global connections, circulations, and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made throughout the world—from the United States and South Asia to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. Through succinct and engaging pieces by scholars, policy makers, activists, and journalists, the volume provides a wholly original view of a continent at the center of global historical processes rather than on the periphery. Global Africa offers fresh, complex, and insightful visions of a continent in flux.

As Africans and descendants of slaves have sought to expand an understanding of their history, focus on the African diaspora--the global dispersal of a people and their culture--has increased. African studies have assumed a prominent place in historical scholarship, and a growing number of non-African scholars has helped revise a discipline established over several decades. The six contributions in this volume were compiled as a result of the thirtieth Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The contributors, nationally recognized in the field, represent a collaborative analysis of the African diaspora from African and non-African perspectives. Joseph E. Harris discusses how the African diaspora influences the economies, politics, and social dynamics of both the homeland and the host country. Alusine Jalloh reconstructs the mercantile activities of the Fula in colonial Sierra Leone. Joseph E. Inikori argues that slavery and serfdom in medieval Europe provide greater insights into precolonial Africa than do standard New World comparisons. Colin A. Palmer examines the power relationships that undergirded American slavery in order to better understand the enslaved. Douglas B. Chambers reveals the enduring influence of Africanisms in the historical development of Afro-Virginian slave culture. And Dale T. Graden looks at African slavery in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil between 1848 and 1856, focusing on the Bahian elite and their response to slave resistance.

This anthology presents a new study of the worldwide African diaspora by bringing together diverse, multidisciplinary scholarship to address the connectedness of Black subject identities, experiences, issues, themes, and topics, applying them dynamically to diverse locations of the Blackworld—Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. The book underscores three dimensions of African diaspora study. First is a global approach to the African diaspora, showing how globalism underscores the distinctive role that Africa plays in contributing to world history. Second is the extension of African diaspora study in a geographical scope to more robust inclusions of not only the African continent but also to uncharted paths and discoveries of lesser-known diaspora experiences and identities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Third is the illustration of universal unwritten cultural representations of humanities in the African diasporas that show the distinctive humanities’ disciplinary representations of Black diaspora imaginaries and subjectivities. The contributing authors inductively apply these themes to focus the reader’s attention on contemporary localized issues and historical arenas of the African diaspora. They engage their findings to critically analyze the broader norms and dimensions that characterize a given set of interrelated criteria that have come to establish parameters that increasingly standardize African diaspora studies.

Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa’s subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author’s sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

This book focuses on retelling many of the important episodes in the global past (c.1500–present) from African points of view. It discusses the events and trends of global significance: the Atlantic slave system, the industrial revolution, World Wars I and II, and decolonization.

"Global Africa will complicate conventional views of Africa as a place of violence, despair and victimhood--a place and space that other people, states, and organizations act on and steal from. Instead, they aim to document some of the significant global connections, circulations, and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made in the world--not just in the United States, but in South Asia, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. They will showcase new framings of Africa, but will not romanticize the conditions and circumstances in which too many people on the continent currently live. The essays in this volume will amplify those voices that offer complex and insightful explanations, strategies for solutions, and inspiration for the future."--Provided by publisher.