Editing African diaspora (section)

== 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."<ref name="AU definition" />

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]].<ref name="Larson, Pier M. 1999 335–62">{{cite journal |type = PDF |title = Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar |journal = William and Mary Quarterly |volume = 56 |issue = 2 |year = 1999 |pages = 335–62 |doi = 10.2307/2674122 |author = Larson, Pier M. |pmid = 22606732 |jstor=2674122 }}</ref> The diaspora that resulted from the Atlantic slave trade, specifically, may also be referred to as the [[Black people|black diaspora]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rotimi |first=Charles N |last2=Tekola-Ayele |first2=Fasil |last3=Baker |first3=Jennifer L |last4=Shriner |first4=Daniel |date=2016-12-01 |title=The African diaspora: history, adaptation and health |url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0959437X16301095 |journal=Current Opinion in Genetics & Development |series=Genetics of human origin |volume=41 |pages=77–84 |doi=10.1016/j.gde.2016.08.005 |issn=0959-437X |pmc=5318189 |pmid=27644073 |quote=The African Diaspora has also been more narrowly defined to include only the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This narrower definition, which emphasizes the important roles that blackness, slavery, colonialism, racism, and geography played in sustaining the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is the reason why some refer to the 'African Diaspora' as the 'Black Diaspora'.}}</ref>

=== Social and political ===
[[File:The Negro in literature and art in the United States (1918) (14576607030).jpg|alt=Du Bois looking to the camera|thumb|20th-century American philosopher and sociologist [[W. E. B. Du Bois]] wrote extensively on the black experience in his homeland and abroad; he spent the last two years of his life in the newly independent [[Ghana]] and got citizenship there.]]
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.<ref name="DECOLONIAL MOVES">{{cite journal |title = Decolonial Moves: Trans-locating African Diaspora Spaces |author = Lao-Montes, Agustín |journal = Cultural Studies |year = 2007 |volume = 21 |issue = 2–3 |pages = 309–38 |doi = 10.1080/09502380601164361 |s2cid = 143048986 }}</ref>

=== African diaspora and modernity ===

In the last decades, studies on the African diaspora have shown an interest in the roles that [[Africa]]ns played in bringing about modernity. This trend also opposes the traditional [[Eurocentrism|eurocentric]] perspective that has dominated history books showing [[Africa]]ns and its diasporans as primitive victims of slavery, and without historical agency. According to [[historian]] [[Patrick Manning (professor)|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 groups<ref>Gilroy, 3</ref> 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.<ref>Manning, Patrick. ''The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture.'' New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, Kindle.</ref>

=== 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.'"<ref name=Iton>Iton, Richard. ''In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era''. [[Oxford University Press]], 2010.</ref>{{rp|199}} 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."<ref name=Iton />{{rp|199–200}} 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)<ref name=Iton />{{rp|199–200}} 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".<ref name=Iton />{{rp|201}}