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.
