The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities that descended from people from Africa. The term most commonly refers to emigrants of people of African heritage but could also refer to descendants of enslaved Africans. via Google Books Scholars typically identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa.Harris, J. E. (1993). "Introduction" In J. E. Harris (ed.), Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, pp. 8–9.
The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from the Greek word (diaspora, "scattering") which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations.In an article published in 1991, William Safran set out six rules to distinguish "diasporas" from general migrant communities. While Safran's definitions were influenced by the idea of the Jewish diaspora, he recognised the expanding use of the term. Rogers Brubaker (2005) also noted that use of the term "diaspora" had started to take on an increasingly general sense. He suggests that one element of this expansion in use "involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space". An early example of the use of "African diaspora" appears in the title of Sidney Lemelle, Robin D. G. Kelley, Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1994). Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from Africa.
The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as consisting: "of people of native or partial African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union". Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union".
History
In the late 20th century, Africans began to emigrate to Europe and the Americas in increasing numbers, constituting new African diaspora communities.
In the Americas, the confluence of multiple ethnic groups from around the world contributed to multi-ethnic societies. In Central and South America, most people are descended from European, Native American, and African ancestry. In 1888, in Brazil nearly half the population were people of African descent, the variation of physical characteristics extends across a broad range.
Concepts and definitions
The African Union defined the African diaspora as "[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."
Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million enslaved Africans were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade, roughly eight million were shipped northwards as part of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, and roughly eleven million were transported to the Americas as part of the Atlantic slave trade. The diaspora that resulted from the Atlantic slave trade, specifically, may also be referred to as the black diaspora.
Social and political
Many scholars have challenged conventional views of the African diaspora as a mere dispersion of African people. For them, it is a movement of liberation that opposes the implications of racialization. Their position assumes that Africans and their descendants abroad struggle to reclaim power over their lives through voluntary migration, cultural production and political conceptions and practices. It also implies the presence of cultures of resistance with similar objectives throughout the global diaspora. Thinkers like W. E. B. Dubois and more recently Robin Kelley, for example, have argued that black politics of survival reveal more about the meaning of the African diaspora than labels of ethnicity and race, and degrees of skin hue. From this view, the daily struggle against what they call the "world-historical processes" of racial colonization, capitalism, and Western domination defines blacks' links to Africa.
African diaspora and modernity
In the last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that Africans played in bringing about modernity. This trend also opposes the traditional eurocentric perspective that has dominated history books showing Africans and its diasporans as primitive victims of slavery, and without historical agency. According to historian Patrick Manning, blacks toiled at the center of forces that created the modern world. Paul Gilroy describes the suppression of blackness due to imagined and created ideals of nations as "cultural insiderism". Cultural insiderism is used by nations to separate deserving and undeserving groupsGilroy, 3 and requires a "sense of ethnic difference" as mentioned in his book The Black Atlantic. Recognizing their contributions offers a comprehensive appreciation of global history.Manning, Patrick. The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, Kindle.
Culture and literature The African diaspora has made significant contributions to global culture, particularly in music and literature. Musical forms include music from Black communities in the Americas and the Caribbean, such as jazz, reggae, samba, and hip-hop. Originating in the Bronx, hip-hop was created by Black Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. It has become a popular genre worldwide.
Writers from the diaspora have also contributed significantly, sharing stories about identity, family, migration, and belonging. Through literature, the diaspora has given a voice to their experiences. African diaspora's influences are common, from the songs people listen to the books they read, showing how the diaspora culture impacts the modern world.
Richard Iton's view of diaspora
Cultural and political theorist Richard Iton suggested that diaspora be understood as a "culture of dislocation". For Iton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and Middle Passage, notions of dispersal, and "the cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing, and retrieving 'Africa.'"Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford University Press, 2010. This conventional framework for analyzing the diaspora is dangerous, according to Iton, because it presumes that diaspora exists outside of Africa, thus simultaneously disowning and desiring Africa. Further, Iton suggests a new starting principle for the use of diaspora: "the impossibility of settlement that correlates throughout the modern period with the cluster of disturbances that trouble not only the physically dispersed but those moved without traveling." Iton adds that this impossibility of settlement—this "modern matrix of strange spaces—outside the state but within the empire"—renders notions of black citizenship fanciful, and in fact, "undesirable". Iton argues that we citizenship, a state of statelessness thereby deconstructing colonial sites and narratives in an effort to "de-link geography and power", putting "all space into play" (emphasis added) For Iton, diaspora's potential is represented by a "rediscursive albeit agonistic field of play that might denaturalize the hegemonic representations of modernity as unencumbered and self-generating and bring into clear view its repressed, colonial subscript".
Definition of the African diaspora A diaspora is defined as a dispersion of a people, language, or culture that was formerly concentrated in one place, to scatter, to displace, to live in separated communities.
The African diaspora is defined as including all African descendants to various parts of the world, particularly of slave trades such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which includes mixed-race people with African ancestry and therefore does not rely on only self-identifying as black. In multiple Latin American countries, many mixed-race people have African ancestry and therefore are considered afrodescendants.
Many other diasporas around the world also include people with only partial ancestry, such as:
The Jewish diaspora includes individuals with Jewish ancestry–such as one Jewish grandparent–even if they do not practise Judaism or identify as Jewish. For example, Israel's Law of Return grants rights based on descent, not ethnic or religious identity. The Chinese diaspora encompasses people in countries like Peru, the Philippines, or Thailand who may be partially Chinese but do not speak Chinese, practise Chinese customs, or self-identify as ethnically Chinese. The Indian diaspora includes anyone of Indian origin. The Indian government tracks data on Overseas Indians, which includes anyone of Indian descent living abroad. This group is divided into Non-Resident Indians (NRIs)–Indian citizens living overseas–and Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) who are foreign nationals with Indian ancestry. PIOs often include people in Southern Africa and the Caribbean descended from 19th-century Indian indentured labourers, many of whom are mixed race. The Indian government has even classified Romani people as PIOs due to their ancestral migration from India to Europe between the 9th and 14th centuries.
In all these cases, diasporic labels are used to recognise lineage and historical connection rather than present-day identity. Afrodescendant inclusion functions similarly: it marks ancestry, not how someone chooses to identify in daily life, in which mixed-race people, such as pardo Brazilians or mixed Dominicans, are of African ancestry, as well as others.
Populations and estimated distribution African diaspora populations include: African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latin Americans, Black Canadians – descendants of mostly enslaved West and Central Africans brought to the United States, the Caribbean, Central America and South America during the Atlantic slave trade. Afro-Arabs (Afro-Saudis, Afro-Omanis, Afro-Syrians, Afro-Palestinians, Afro-Iraqis, Afro-Jordanians, etc.), Afro-Iranians, Afro-Turks – descendants of Zanj slaves whose ancestors were brought to the Near East and other parts of Asia during the Indian Ocean slave trade. Siddis – descendants of Zanj slaves whose ancestors were brought to the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan and India). Also referred to as the Makrani in Pakistan.