African diaspora
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. Scholars typically identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa. The first phase includes the ancient migrations of early humans out of Africa, which laid the foundations for the global human population. The second phase centers on the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, during which millions of Africans were forcibly relocated to the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean. This period significantly shaped the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of many countries. The third phase involves voluntary migrations during the 19th and 20th centuries, often driven by economic opportunities, colonialism, and political upheaval. Lastly, the contemporary phase includes ongoing migrations in the 20th and 21st centuries, characterized by globalization and the pursuit of education, employment, and asylum. The African diaspora has contributed profoundly to global culture, politics, and identity, influencing music, cuisine, language, and social movements worldwide.
The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from the Greek word which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations. Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from Africa.
The African Union 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 " 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 groups 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.Culture and Literature
The African diaspora has shaped global culture, specifically in music and literature. Musical forms rooting from Black communities in the Americas and the Caribbean such as jazz, reggae, samba, and hiphop. Hip hop is one of the best examples and it started in the Bronx, created by African American and Afro-Caribbean youth and has grown into one of the most popular music genres around the world. Writers from the African diaspora have also made contributions by sharing stories about identity, family, migration, and the sense of belonging. Through literature, people are able to understand what diaspora life is really like and it gives a voice to experiences from the past. The influence of the African diaspora can be seen everywhere, from songs people listen to, and to the books they read. All of this helps show that the culture from the African diaspora still has an impact on 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.'" 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" 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".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-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. Also referred to as the Makrani in Pakistan.
| Continent or region | Country population | Afro-descendants | African and African-mixed population |
| Caribbean | 41,309,327 | 67% | 27,654,061 |
 Saint Kitts and NevisThe Americas
During the 17th and 18th centuries, most European colonies in the Caribbean operated on plantation economies fueled by slave labor, and the resulting importation of enslaved Africans meant that Afro-Caribbeans soon far outnumbered their European enslavers in terms of population. Roughly eleven to twelve million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Beginning in 1791, the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion by self-emancipated slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue eventually led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti. The new state, led by Jean Jacques Dessalines was the first nation in the Americas to be established from a successful slave revolt and represented a challenge to the existing slave systems in the region. Continuous waves of slave rebellions, such as the Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe in British Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region, with Great Britain abolishing it in the 1830s. The Spanish colony of Cuba was the last Caribbean island to emancipate its slaves. During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people began to assert their cultural, economic and political rights on the world stage. The Jamaican Marcus Garvey formed the UNIA movement in the United States, continuing with Aimé Césaire's négritude movement, which was intended to create a pan-African movement across national lines. From the 1960s, the decolonization of the Americas led to various Caribbean countries gaining their independence from European colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as calypso, reggae music, and Rastafari within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a new Afro-Caribbean diaspora, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc in the United States, was influential in the creation of the black power and hip hop movements. Influential political theorists such as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall contributed to anti-colonial theory and movements in Africa, as well as cultural developments in Europe. |