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In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois contemplated lifting himself above the "veil" of racial prejudice, a space that seemed to exist only on the written page, where pure thought would be unconstrained by the material limitations imposed by the other side of the color line. This essay examines what "veils" the discipline of landscape architecture erected that have compartmentalized a scholar like Du Bois away from the field. Black landscapes of slavery and emancipation rarely emerge, if they emerge at all, in landscape architecture historiography. In order to acknowledge and understand this lacuna, landscape architects need to follow in the footsteps of, and engage in a dialogue with, archaeologists, anthropologists, scholars of history and specialists of African American studies, literary scholars, and descendants, among others. This article examines two interrelated circumstances that show how this multifaceted lacuna has come about: the social, economic, and cultural climate that led to the founding of the first landscape architecture program in the United States and the discipline's gradual uprooting from agriculture and its exclusive identification with a practice of design at the expense of vernacular traditions. Only by learning to embrace difference itself, of traditions as well as methodologies, will landscape architecture be able to appreciate the writings of Du Bois and other Black scholars and the landscapes and living places of the African diaspora and Afro descendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from a larger project that is founded on four narrative case studies that examine the ways in which Black activists in Toronto mobilize their cultural production—namely, spoken word poetry and rapping—in support of their activism, community education, and community organizing work. This particular article is founded on the work of Kofi, a pseudonym for a Toronto activist who mobilizes spoken word poetry as a method of community organizing and as a medium for Black folks to speak to their emotional lives and communal healing practices. As such, the particular narratives shared in this article continue to provide important contributions to the "new era of black words" (Fisher 2003 , 362). It is through this creative labor, these activists and cultural producers address the sociology of anti-Black racism that deeply influences the lives of Afrodiasporic people in Canada. They are composers and constructors of strategies and perspectives that are founded within the historical, political, cultural, and social forces influencing Black Canada (McKittrick 2002 ; Austin 2013). This work continues the conversation about what it means to be Black in Canada, providing counternarratives that stand against the hegemonic and often racist ways Black people and Black communities are imagined in Canada (Austin 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted to restrict educational supply for social control, the strength of the demand—and the accompanying pedagogical, organizational, and political innovations—illustrates the power of education to empower marginalized communities. Through reviewing work in economics, history, and political science, we highlight the transformative effects of formal education in Black communities as well as the centrality of Black people in demanding access to higher education and innovating new political ideas and pedagogies that saw education as a force for liberation. Governments and citizens must continue to work to correct the inherited distortions in the supply of education in Black communities in Africa as well as in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, the Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu achieved independence from French and British colonialism. The political condominium's Black Power–affiliated Vanua'aku Pati (VP) threw off its imposed Scottish moniker of New Hebrides and crowned itself Vanuatu. The country considered itself a Melanesian nation and a Black Pacific member of the Africana world. Harnessing a distinctly Black internationalist foreign policy, the VP strategically positioned Vanuatu to be a radical advocate for the anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles of Oceania and the Black Diaspora. This article shows how its immediate concerns were both ecological and political—nuclear testing in Oceania, French colonialism in New Caledonia, Indonesian imperialism in West Papua, and apartheid in South Africa. From political spaces like the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific conferences and its permanent mission to the United Nations based in Harlem, Vanuatu challenged nuclear testing in Oceania, denounced French colonialism in New Caledonia, and identified itself with radical states such as Libya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sandra Gunning's book, "Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic," explores how travel writing functioned for Black authors in the nineteenth century. Gunning expands the definition of travel narrative to include work that is not traditionally considered part of the genre. The book also examines the unique political arguments that travel narratives can offer. Gunning analyzes the experiences and identities of individual authors, highlighting the complex intersections of location and mobility. The book emphasizes the diversity of Black diasporic identities and affirms the humanity of Black subjects. [Extracted from the article]

This new estimate fits well with ages obtained for the beginning of the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and with the fossil evidence for the genesis of I Homo sapiens i in Africa. Chapter 8 is a review by Vicente and Schlebusch of ancient DNA research in Africa and the current status of population histories on the continent. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores datafication as a speculative discourse that fundamentally and instrumentally misunderstands data, not as a representational system, but as an ontology. This analysis of datafication takes a semiotic and media-archaeological approach to datafication, understanding it as an imaginary media system, and the article looks to supplementary discourses in data visualization and big data to clarify and expand an understanding of datafication as a prescriptive and speculative idea. This critique is sharpened through the exploration of a detailed study of the early visualizations and unpublished fictions of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose imagined technology of the "megascope" gives a remarkable blueprint for contemporary discourses in data visualization and data science. Du Bois's liberatory perspective is contrasted to a more paranoid example coming from the self-documented delusional system of Daniel Paul Schreber, who provides a much different vision of a totalizing media system in the form of an Aufschreibesysteme , which seems to presage another side of datafication as a surveillance system. Taken together, datafication, the megascope, and the Aufschreibesysteme work as three speculative media that imagine themselves as different instances or visions of a totalizing media system, a notion that has become especially significant in the technological, cultural, and economic systems of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the many examples of Black internationalist protest against US empire in secular society, scholars have not recorded the same degree of ambivalence among Black Protestant Christians at the end of the nineteenth century. Countering a singular vision of Black Christian thought, this article examines a moment in African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church history when clergy quarreled over the idea of ecclesiastical imperialism—the attempt to unite all people of African descent through Protestant Christian evangelization and AME Church expansion. Stationed in Haiti, Episcopal bishop James T. Holly developed the idea of ecclesiastical imperialism in opposition of the AME Church's reunion with the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church of Canada. Rather than a petty interdenominational dispute, the AME-BME organic union debate exposed the paradox of Black equality predicated on white religious supremacy. Objectors to the union challenged the AME Church's emerging ideology of Pan-African Christian unity and charted a distinct path forward for the denomination, the African Diaspora, and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Kwame Nkrumah's overthrow in 1966, a group of Ghanaian intellectuals brought their specific version of Pan-Africanism into the United States at precisely the moment when Black studies programs were being formed. Consequently, they shaped the trajectory of the field and linked it to a specifically African intellectual project. These Ghanaian intellectuals sought to inject an Africa-centered sense of what political education and political mobilization meant into the framework of Black studies. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University, they worked to make Europe's ongoing economic exploitation of Africa, the persistence of white supremacist regimes in southern Africa, and the US government's support of these oppressive forces key parts of the otherwise US-centric curricula of Black studies programs. The role that Ghanaian intellectuals played in the United States helps us illuminate the unexplored intellectual impact of African scholars in the 1970s and 1980s outside of Africa on Black internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage's The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris's essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn's analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay's Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting's London creation to explore Savage's choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, historians have been recovering the stories of Black women radicals. Apart from their general orientation toward politics, two qualities distinguish these women: their internationalism, and their rebellion against bourgeois notions of respectability. This article intervenes in this discussion by examining key moments in the life of Goldie Watson, a onetime Communist and an elementary schoolteacher in Philadelphia from the 1930s to the 1960s. I argue that Watson's commitment to teaching as a profession and her lack of concern with the African Diaspora signal a profound commitment to American political institutions. Her early work with Popular Front groups in Philadelphia in the 1930s, her postwar civil rights activism, her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954, and her subsequent litigation against the federal and municipal governments all demonstrate an essentially instrumental orientation toward American communism and a steady commitment not to rejecting bourgeois norms and institutions but to enlarging the space for African American freedom in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to analyze the cultural and political significance of soccer, popularly known as football, in Black diasporic communities in New York City, from 1928 to 1949. While the historical scholarship on African American and African Diasporic culture and history has ignored the centrality of soccer to Black life, this article situates soccer within a long tradition of Black athletic politics, particularly during the interwar period. Black soccer challenges the narratives of American exceptionalism and the ways the United States exploited Black athletes as representatives of racial progress and assimilation before and immediately following World War II. Focusing on the Falcon Athletic Club and, to a lesser extent, the Maroons Football Club, I hope to reveal the diasporic circuits and politics of Black soccer during the interwar years in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusess topics within the issue including African Diaspora, and migration patterns of Black Texans.

The Danish West Indies has often been left out of comparative investigations of slavery between the United States and the Caribbean. This study examines the natural and social environments of two enslaved communities in an effort to reveal the greatest threats to the lives of enslaved peoples and how each community responded differently to such threats. A mix of archaeological and documentary evidence recovered from James and Dolley Madison's Montpelier plantation in Virginia and the Christiansted National Historic Site in St. Croix has revealed an archaeology of struggle, a form of double consciousness in the minds of enslaved peoples, oscillating between self‐preservation and resistance in the daily fight for survival. The diversity of livelihoods across the African Diaspora is illuminated by comparing the lives of Afro‐Caribbeans enslaved by the Danish Crown in St. Croix, within an urban, non‐plantation, and sugar‐based industry, to that of African Americans enslaved by a US president in Virginia, within a rural, plantation, and tobacco‐based industry. The results indicate that enslaved peoples in different regions did not have the same primary concerns or face the same environmental dangers and, as a result, invented different ways of coping with the unique struggles they faced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a decade after Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 Abolition Act to end the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Scotland still struggles to reconcile her colonial past. Unlike in North America, historical archaeology centered on the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is still highly marginalized in British academia. Furthermore, Scotland's roles in slave‐based economies is only recently being considered a relevant area of historical studies. This paper emerges from my evolving perspective as a Black American scholar and resident in the United Kingdom, as I strive to create intellectual spaces in and outside of academia. Through civic engagement, I use my work on African diasporic foodways in the French Caribbean to link with a similar material basis of resistance in the British Caribbean and engage British audiences whose connections to Atlantic slavery are yet to be fully recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the archaeology of the African Diaspora fails to consider local contexts or stakeholders, it creates historical problems for communities and researchers and leads to antagonistic research sites and adverse consequences for residents. To counter this, some archaeological research emphasizes collaboration and stakeholder involvement in order to reshape the way archaeology is experienced in community sites. Building on this work, I offer an ethnographically informed approach to African Diaspora archaeology as a collaborative method that takes local issues, histories, and politics seriously. I demonstrate how ethnography allows for a better understanding of the past and present peoples of Bocas del Toro, Panama, and can provide archaeologists committed to combating oppression with political tactics for their research. Indeed, this approach is part of a broader trend in African diasporic archaeology, which understands its work as a means for social justice. This article shows how communities can be an archaeological resource to understand data about a historical past, and in turn how African Diaspora archaeologists can be resources for local communities. It details ethnographic methods as they unfolded within the community of Bocas del Toro, Panama, in order to demonstrate an approach that builds with and in some cases can repair relationships between archaeologists and the communities we work with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using oral histories as its main mode of archaeological inquiry, this article presents a case study of the migration patterns of former residents from Antioch Colony, Texas, from 1900 to 1940. This approach offers a nuanced analysis of African American migration in the recent past, showing how people move through space in archaeological studies of landscapes and how movement was incorporated in Black spatial productions. A sizeable number of the migrants studied relocated seventeen miles north to Austin, Texas, suggesting that for many former residents of Antioch Colony, place‐attachment and place‐familiarity largely shaped places of possibility. By recovering patterns of African American movement within the historical record this article finds that the freedom to move continued to be ingrained in the spatial practices of Black people during the postbellum time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines impostor as a political actor and an intellectual but also suggests imposture as a useful analytical category for the study of Afro-diasporic politics, culture, and thought in the interwar U.S. It mentions deal about the social norms and cultural beliefs in the societies in which imposture occurred and characterized by political and labor radicalism, global migration, cultural transformation, and, for countless African Americans.

In the 1960s Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) produced a series of collages that signaled, via text and symbols, her experiences with and protracted study of Haitian Vodou ceremonial practices. Jones began traveling to Haiti in the summer of 1954. This article examines her aesthetic transformation over the next decade—the move from her representational paintings of the 1950s to her abstract collages of the 1960s—and argues that Jones’s eventual turn to collage is connected to her acquisition of a diasporic literacy and her ongoing study of Vodou symbolism, particularly the emblematic drawings known as vèvè. After discussing prior African American artistic engagements with Haiti, trends in modern Haitian art, Jones’s role as cultural ambassador, and the specifics of the multilayered Haitian Vodou rituals, attention turns to the ways in which collage offered the artist an opportunity to experiment with and make sense of an unfamiliar cultural practice. Finally, this focused analysis of Jones’s collages suggests this medium/technique is especially appropriate to diasporic expression because it is predicated on the cut and the subsequent combination of disparate elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the history of pan-Africanism and end of the era. It mentions that diasporas as sites of African physical enslavement and intellectual reconstitution demanded the liberation of all Africans now defined and dichotomized as beings at "home and abroad." It cites the United Nations World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss articles in the issue on topics including African diaspora religions and anthropology, social aspects of the citizenship of African American Muslims, and the practices of Pentecostal maternity in Nigeria.

This article considers the way genealogical approaches to religion have not been able to take into account how the production of knowledge, including religious knowledge, affects global politics. Specifically, it is concerned with the production of expert testimony, which is used to provide the evidentiary basis for a new industry of civil and human rights claims and protections. I explore how genealogical approaches to religion offer a way to see that the constructs we understand to be religion were produced and rendered legible through the formation of contemporary constructions of knowledge and power. I demonstrate that-through these approaches-in order for religious protections to be acknowledged in legal domains, they also need to be rendered visible and legible to the law. Ultimately, I argue that the production of these knowledge practices into portable knowledge packages enables courts to assess issues that have resulted from the migration of ethnic and religious groups; but they also tell us a lot about the limits of genealogical approaches in understanding fully the complexities of Black Atlantic religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of anthropology's much storied crisis of representation; attempted corrections following movements of "Third World" peoples, women, and queer folks; the recent disavowal of 1980s and 1990s reflexivity and experimentation; and what George Marcus has recently termed a "crisis of reception," this essay seeks to critically reassess and reanimate the formative interventions of anthropologists of the African diaspora (including Africa itself)--foregrounding work that lends new insights into anthropological theory, method, and pedagogy. The intention here is not to merely redeem the pioneering insights of African diaspora anthropologists as unsung forerunners of contemporary anthropological theories (though this is a worthwhile endeavor in itself) but rather to illuminate continued and prospective contributions of this mode of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Argentina's black population has made some interesting interventions into the public politics of race. This involvement was motivated by some significant historical shifts that brought race to the forefront of public discourse. Blacks in Argentina have looked to the African Diaspora worldwide for inspiration, but like the majority of Argentines, they have consistently had their finger on the pulse of United States' racial politics, which has long served as a global paradigm for understanding race relations. The United States' political and cultural climate has also had an impact on the development of local conversations about race, especially the historic election of Barack Obama. In this work, I examine how Africans and Afro-descendants in Buenos Aires are grappling with race and identity in a society that defines itself as European. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cultural anthropology in regards to global African diaspora. It discusses impact of journey to Cameroon in Central Africa that inspire author to travel around and experience different cultures such as the Bamum culture, Gnawa culture, maroons from Reunion Island in Indian Ocean and Afro-Ecuadorian culture. It talks about the anthropological novels of writers Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, and Melville Herskovits.

This article explores complexities of identity inhered in African Diasporic communities through an investigation of Spanish-speaking Afro-Latinas/os and Latinas/os of African descent in a predominantly Black middle school. Participant observation and interview data collected over 17 months revealed a school whose members represent peoples of diverse African descent. Among educators and students at the research site, Diasporic encounters reveal ideologies grounded in a lack of awareness and misconceptions about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Particularly for Afro-Latina/o students and educators, these ideologies influenced the creation of their own distinct racial and ethnic identities and subjectivities and informed how they understand and experience notions of Diaspora. The findings of this study suggest that fostering informed discussions about race, ethnicity, nationality, and Diaspora in schools would benefit both students and educators, particularly Afro-Latinas/os and Latinas/ os of African descent. Such discussions would allow Diaspora to be used as a tool for learning about Diasporic complexities in ways that positively impact identity making and relationship building among and across students and faculty in increasingly diverse U.S. schools. [Afro-Latinas/os, Diaspora, education, racialization, Blackness] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on human rights activist Malcolm X's theories of transnationalism and his role in the Kenyan Mau Mau Rebellion focusing on the views shared by Kenyan revolutionaries in their struggle against colonial rule. It discusses the history of land distribution issues in Kenya, African diaspora, and racial segregation in U.S. It also discusses Malcolm X's role in supporting the African Americans in U.S. and other liberation movements in several parts of Africa.

The article discusses scholar and activist St. Clair Drake's research and pedagogical work on the African diaspora, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. Details on the roles of anthropology and sociology in Drake's scholarship and his interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Caribbean are presented. Drake's role in mentoring graduate students is also discussed.

This study focuses on the African American dance pedagogy designed by Katherine Dunham and how this story is linked to the intellectual genealogy of African American anthropology. Dunham is argued to be a 'decolonizing dance pedagogue' to describe how she recovered important dance epistemologies relevant to people of the African diaspora. Reconciling the consequences of colonization and racism in the 'new world,' she engaged in a 'critical postcolonial dance recovery.' Dunham's dance education developed from ethnographic research was used to disseminate relevant cultural and spiritual capital in the United States (Cruz Banks, 2009b). Her dance pedagogy is connected to historical and current discourses on racism, colonialism, and practices of decolonizing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible to understand African lifeways without recourse to oral traditions because behaviors, orientations, and attitudes are succinctly codified, contextualized, and only fully explainable with reference to oral traditions, especially through the use of proverbs. Unfortunately, recent studies have not sufficiently utilized proverbs as analytical frameworks to explain African kinship. Thus, in this article we explore dynamics of kinship among international migrants of Nigerian origin through qualitative, primary and secondary data. We demonstrate that in the worldview of the international migrants, (1) kinship is mutable, (2) kinship constructions are based on practical usefulness and rational signification rather than simply biological relatedness, and (3) kinship's etherealness can be best understood through traditional proverbs. We conclude that kinship is complex, dynamic, and liable to continuous construction, reconstruction, appropriation, and rejection depending on its instrumentalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates one Black queer subject's sense of self and gestures toward the potential theoretical intervention this subjectivity poses. However, it begins by situating Black queerness in conceptual and geographic space. It proposes the usefulness of an anthropologically informed embodied listening practice for Black Queer Studies and foregrounds situated, speaking Black queer subjects in the articulation of a Black Queer Diaspora Studies. Finally, it approaches a wider geo-conceptual metaphor for the transdisciplinarity required if we are to take seriously the seductive invitation to speculate Black and queer at once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author offers observations on the aesthetic traditions of the Gnawa, people that are descendants of slaves brought from Sahelian Africa to Morocco. Particular focus is given to how the African diaspora in Morocco has impacted the spiritual traditions of the Gnawa. Several items used by the Gnawa in their rituals and ceremonies are described including a lute-like instrument called a guinbri and a patchwork gown called a Buderbala. Details relating to Moroccan Sufism and Sahelian African spirit possession are also discussed.

The article analyzes the scholarship of African American historian Gerald Horne, specifically his use of historical archives to study the African Diaspora. The author praises Horne's willingness to travel all over the world to utilize archives and argues that Horne's study of the interrelationships between oppressors has exposed the slave traders and imperialists of history. It is argued that Horne's scholarship was a forerunner of the African Diaspora Studies. The author asserts that Horne's scholarship has produced the discovery of links between the rules of segregation in East Africa and Jim Crow laws in the U.S.

I mostly focus on Clarke's point that the “old African diaspora” and the “new African diaspora” are grounded on different ontologies. I show that even though I have great sympathy for her larger argument, the separation between old and new diasporas runs the risk of appearing somewhat simplistic and even perhaps unrealistic. I conclude with the assertion that if it is true that contemporary African states have engaged in the production and circulation of “new narratives of diaspora,” it is not less true that the same states also manipulate—particularly in sites of memory in West African contexts—older narratives centered on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way in which contemporary physics offers different categories of time, or temporal coordinates, that can help shed life on the “closed” epistemologies in African Diaspora Studies. Using the example of Kamari Clarke's “New Spheres of Transnational Formations: Mobilizations of Humanitarian Diasporas,” this article argues that Clarke's use of what physicists refer to as “B series time” provides a broader, more inclusive epistemology for the study of the African diaspora in the Social Sciences and Humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary interrogates Clarke's paper on African diasporas. It argues that though Clarke seeks to open new analytical lenses on African diasporas by focusing on postslavery African diasporas, it does not advance the scholarship on the subject because of its limited conceptions of Africa and the global dimensions of African diasporas. As is common in Eurocentric African studies, “Africa” is seen as coterminous with sub-Saharan Africa, and Clarke universalizes the histories of Afro-Atlantic diaspora to the histories of Afro-European and Afro-Asian diasporas. Her notion of humanitarian diasporas also limits the scope of the engagements between Africa and its diasporas. My commentary tries to offer an alternative historiography of the global dimensions of African diasporas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of slavery in Georgia's low country and explores how the African diasporic communities that emerged there were able to retain a strong collective identity. It examines the influence that the homogeneity of the region's cultural and ethnic composition had on identity retention and discusses how the social context helped promote resistance among enslaved Africans. It also discusses the role that the region's high African and African American to white population ratio played in maintaining cultural identity.