Between Diaspora and Homeland: The Study of Africa and the African Diaspora in the USA

Abstract

The end of the Cold War resulted in a decline of one of its academic handmaidens, area studies, and a rise in other academic pursuits, including diaspora studies, among them African diaspora studies. Yet African diaspora studies is not new, but rather has a long genealogy, especially among the Western African diaspora, meaning the African diaspora in the Western world, in the Americas and Europe. Ideologically, the defining contribution of the Western African diaspora was a worldview that conceived of peoples of African descent not in ethnic, national, imperial, regional, or even continental terms, but in global ones. In the new academic dispensation, the study of peoples of African descent globally should build on this tradition and eschew particularism, exceptionalism, and national historiography in favor of a transnational, transcontinental, and transoceanic approach.