Diaspora

“Diaspora” is a contested term. The African diaspora is, like the nation, an “imagined community” (B. Anderson [1983] 2006) conceived of and performed based on imperfect memories, evidence, and agendas. As the historian Colin Palmer asserts, “In many respects, diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs; it is we who often call them into being” (2000, 29). Within Black studies literatures, diaspora is mobilized as a method in pursuit of collectives whose histories and cultures were/are otherwise hidden or forcibly taken as part of the development of Western epistemes (formal and informal) and the violences of chattel slavery and colonialism. Variously referred to as “Black,” “African” or a series of national monikers prefixed by a version of “Afro-­,” the actors who called for the African diaspora are loosely tied together by a recognition of indigenous Africa as origin as well as a relation to Blackness as sociocultural identity. No more stable than “diaspora,” “Black(ness)” too is a contested term. The literary scholar Michelle Wright argues that “from the start, Black identity has been produced in contradiction” (2004, 1), noting the irregularity of the category and appellation as well as the fact that Blackness as production—­becoming—­and as material experience only exists relative to a series of additional constructions and world systems that produce “differences and disagreements among black populations on a number of registers” (B. Edwards 2003, 7). The word “diaspora,” then, invites experimentation within the categories of identity—­citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and ability—­that the theorist Stuart Hall argued are “never complete, always in progress”(1990, 222). Diaspora as performance and practice is contested and (re)made over and over again, revealing its complexity and dynamism, which stems from the constant agitation among its subjects as well as the movements that disperse those persons around the globe. As such, the African diaspora is a people, process, encounter, ambition, and project.