Introduction
For well over a decade, "diaspora" has been a remarkably productive
arena of scholarship. The founding of the journal diaspora in
1991; the appearance of works such as Avtar Brah's Cartographies of
Diaspora, Braziel and Mannur's Theorizing Diaspora, and Brent
Hayes Edwards' The Practice of Diaspora; and special issues of
journals (African Studies Review, Feminist Review,
Gender and History) devoted to African diaspora have produced
diaspora as a formulation that, along with transnational,
Atlantic, and black Atlantic studies, enables scholars to see past
national boundaries and understand subjects as situated within a range
of sometimes overlapping communities and connections. This broader
interest in the study of diasporas occurs in conjunction with a salutary
rethinking of the past and future of African diaspora studies. Initially
referring to Greek and Jewish dispersals, "the African diaspora" emerged
as an important framework of analysis in mid-1950s Paris (Edwards,
"Langston Hughes" 690-91; Shepperson 41). In a much-cited quote from
their essay "Unfinished Migrations," Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D.
G. Kelley define African diaspora as "both a process and a condition,"
producing subjects and communities through often-coerced dispersals,
while also producing varying identifications with and desires to return
to a "homeland" (see also Brah, 196; Clifford 304-5; Patterson and
Kelley 20; Safran 83-4; Tölölyan 654). As Kim D. Butler argues, these
identities and identifications constantly shift: "Conceptualizations of
diaspora must be able to accommodate the reality of multiple identities
and phases of diasporaization over time" (193).
But while, as Brent Edwards notes, articulations of diaspora always
rely on and reproduce both existing racial hierarchies and "the
ideological uses and abuses of gender," they also engender new
subjectivities, identifications, and communities that reconstitute
conceptions of race and of gender (Practice 133). For this issue,
we sought essays that address how contemporary African diasporas
generate new forms of gendering. We asked, "How are new forms of
gendering in African diasporas being articulated, and in what contexts?
To what extent do these new forms rely on, depart from, intersect with,
and/or efface older forms? What are the consequences of these new
gendered subjectivities? What questions do they provoke or elide?"
We wanted to think through the effects of such studies on methodology
and discipline formation. Recent scholarship examines how late
twentieth-century flows of migration, peoples, labor, technology, and
capital have produced new African diasporas, as well as local, regional,
and global identities and cultures, that may not be adequately captured
when situating the middle passage as the site of origin for the study of
the African diaspora. Emergent fields, such as postcolonial, migration,
globalization, human rights, and queer studies have been preoccupied
with analyzing flows of goods, people, ideas, and capital in
postcolonial, transnational, cosmopolitan, and globalized contexts. How
do these fields engage with diaspora studies? How might diaspora studies
intervene in how these fields address diaspora? Similarly, what would a
feminist and/or queer study of the African diaspora look like? How would
it draw from or respond to feminist and queer studies in other
disciplines?
Along with the efforts to develop more dynamic and nuanced
understandings of diaspora, as discussed above, most contemporary
theorizations of African diaspora have noted the need for a
consideration of gender, class, sexuality, and nation in the context of
diaspora (e.g., Campt and Thomas; Gunning, et al 1-12; Sheftall
27-28; Steady). Yet, despite these interventions, women, gender, and
sexuality still seem to be conceptualized as ancillary or additive to a
basic understanding of processes of diaspora. This is particularly true
with understanding the roles of women. In Becoming Black: Creating
Identity in the African Diaspora, Michelle Wright notes that in some
early formulations of black subjectivity in founding texts of diaspora,
"black women, as agents, disappear altogether" (124). More forcefully,
Asale Angel-Ajani contends that "African diaspora studies fail women
miserably, or at least much of the published works do" (296).
It seems that we still have not reached a point where the study of
gender and women of the black diaspora fundamentally re-organizes our
conceptions of diaspora. While the essays in this volume certainly point
in exciting directions, much more work remains to understand "African
diaspora" and " gender" as mutually imbricated. The formation of the
Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and
its meetings in a range of locations have the potential to produce the
multi-disciplinary collaborations across the diaspora we need for this
kind of fundamental re-thinking. However, the overwork and limited
resources of so many female scholars and activists means that we need to
find more time and increasingly innovative ways to work together across
space and discipline.
We found in these essays important themes or concerns that speak to
broader developments in African diaspora studies. Several of the
contributors to this issue demonstrate how considerations of gender
impel reconceptualizations of diaspora, as well as of race, resistance,
and historiography itself, particularly through a focus on sites often
neglected by African diaspora studies scholarship: Indian Ocean slavery,
enslaved peoples in Indian territory, the Dutch Caribbean, Latin
America, and East and West Africa. Many of these pieces remind us that
we need to consider the specificities of the local and regional, to
think not only about large-scale dispersals but also about "internal"
diasporas (such as within Africa) and "overlapping diasporas" (Lewis;
see also Byfield 5ff). Most of the writers insist on the usefulness of
the terms feminism and diaspora both within and outside
the academy; they also foreground the conflicts and tensions the terms
provoke, especially around presumptions of shared histories, political
agendas, strategies, community, identities, and imaginings of Africa as
"homeland." They remind us that race is still a site of analysis for
diaspora studies in a way not true for transnational or migration
studies, while still questioning the terms by which African diaspora
studies can make sure that the social justice commitment at its heart is
as anti-sexist as it is anti-racist and anti-colonialist.
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