“Rewriting Dispersal” is very much tied to its conditions of production: it originated from conversations between the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College and the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). Despite claims of inclusivity within and beyond the academy, all too frequently women of color, particularly women of the African diaspora, disappear in discussions of “women” or evocations of “sisterhood.” Many Africana studies and black studies programs have thus struggled over issues of gender, even as they evolve to reflect scholarly growth in African diaspora studies. As Noliwe Rooks noted in the 1990s, a number of African-American and black studies programs transformed into Africana or black diaspora (160-61), a change that reflects an increased focus on diaspora as process and an acknowledgement of the differences between peoples within the black diaspora, even while maintaining a commitment to social change advanced by the study of race, black lives, and black culture. It is a welcome mark of our progress that we were invited by BCRW to develop this volume as one way to make visible the necessary institutional and intellectual links between women’s/gender studies and African diaspora studies. The Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative also provided crucial funding for the effort. We hope that electronic fora committed to transnational dialogue, such as The Scholar & Feminist Online, can become important venues for the “global” rethinking of the relation between gender, sexuality, and African diaspora.
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