African Diaspora(s): Sociological Significances of Global Phenomena

The African Diaspora is generally understood as the involuntary and voluntary dispersals of Africans throughout the world. Historians George Shepperson and Joseph E. Harris are largely credited with defining the diaspora as a global formation shaped by historical processes and maintained by systematic inequality. In addition to other social scientists, sociologists Robin Cohen and Ruth Simms Hamilton have provided strong paradigms for understanding common features of the African Diaspora at the macro-level; while Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy advanced important ideas about micro-level cultural production, specifically in the West. Since Hall and Gilroy’s influential propositions, many have eschewed a central African ‘diaspora’ in favor of smaller, more recent migrations of ethnic and/or nationality groups.

This session embraces a general conceptualization of the diaspora and invites papers on global African Diaspora communities. Its call is deliberately broad and extends to empirical studies of cultural and structural issues relating to peoples of African descent in and beyond the West. Additionally of interest are conceptual papers that engage with the ideas, directions, and trajectories of general diasporas; Africa-centered theorizing; and the zones surrounding the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and Mediterranean Sea as analytical units. The session aims to provide a space for the presentation of new and recent work that develops and engages non-essentialist, non-homogenizing complexity of cultural identities and expressions from artistic and literary realms. The approach to African Diaspora ‘significances’ also encompasses political and collective actions, links between historical and current racial formations.