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Literary Research: African Diaspora Studies
Literary Theory and Criticism
What is African Diaspora Studies?
The term African diaspora gained currency from the 1950s and 1960s in the English-speaking world, especially the United States. As pointed out by George Shepperson, none of the major intellectual forerunners of African diaspora studies, from Edward Blyden (1832–1912), the influential nineteenth-century Caribbean-born Liberian thinker, to W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the renowned African-American scholar-activist, used the term African diaspora. The Negritude writers from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean also did not use it. Instead, the term used to define and mobilize African populations globally was Pan-Africanism. One of the challenges in African diaspora studies, then, has been to overcome an American and English language-centered model of identity for African diasporas globally. (New Dictionary of the History of Ideas)
Brief Overviews:
- Diaspora Studies (The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature)
- Diasporas (The Encyclopedia of Global Studies)
- Diaspora (Encyclopedia of Black Studies)
Notable Scholars:
- Busby, Margaret. Daughters of Africa : an International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present. 1st American ed., Pantheon Books, 1992.
- Busby, Margaret, editor. New Daughters of Africa : an International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent. First US edition., Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.
- Hall, Stuart, et al. Selected writings on race and difference. Duke University Press, 2021.
- Hall, Stuart. Selected Political Writings : the Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. Edited by Bill Schwarz et al., Lawrence and Wishart, 2016.
- Hall, Stuart., and David. Morley. Essential Essays, Volume II : Identity and Diaspora. [publisher not identified], 2018.
- Gilroy, Paul. After Empire : Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia. Routledge, 2004.
- Gilroy, Paul. Darker Than Blue : on the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Harvard University Press, 2010.
- Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack : the Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Routledge Publisher, 2002
Introductions & Anthologies
The Digital Black Atlantic by Publication Date: 2021Exploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.
Transnational Black Dialogues by Publication Date: 2016Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl's provocative readings of Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes and Marlon James' The Book of Night Women delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.
The Future of Black Studies by Publication Date: 2022
