The African Diaspora and the Disciplines [Paperback]

Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.

The volume as a whole reflects a courageous effort: it goes beyond empirical specifics of the African diaspora to provide an interim report on intellectual work crossing the boundaries of national units and disciplinary boxes. Vol. 52.2, 2011Truly remarkable, innovative, important, and critical scholarship that is unparalleled in its interventions at the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological levels.Opens the way for a still emergent field, emergent in its attention to how global histories and processes figure in geographic regions and subjects beyond the Cold War configuration of regional political alliances.Overall, this collection is a very timely and useful contribution to the slowly emerging body of studies of the African diasporas.

Tejumola Olaniyan is the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Arrest the Music! (IUP, 2004).

James H. Sweet is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 14411770.

Introduction / Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet

Part 1. Histories
1. Clio and the Griot: Thl#1