Human Rights in America and the Muslim Ban

To understand the concept of "illegal immigration", used to justify this administration's recent #MuslimBan, it may be helpful to revisit the history of slavery in the United States. 1776-1863 "Slaves should only be able to get their freedom legally" 2017 "Immigrants should only be able to get their citizenship legally" Lesson some of y'all Christians need to learn: Legality is a relative concept. Human rights are not. Legality comes from man-made states. Human rights come from an eternal God. I'm not going to look down on any person seeking to get citizenship in the united states of america, when citizenship in a state is the only mechanism for accessing human rights. Some of you advocating deportation of immigrants need to think about this. You wouldn't dare claim now that the freedom of an enslaved human being in the USA was dependent on them getting freedom legally, yet you have the gall to act like you have the moral high ground when it comes to immigration because of "legality." Would you have turned in a fugitive slave in 19th century America because they were seeking to get their human rights through illegal means? If the answer is no, then why would you insist on this legality when it comes to refugees seeking citizenship in 2017? People have a right to use whatever means necessary to access their basic human rights. Setting up fortress-like enclaves based on fictions of manmade legality, in the middle of the largest migration crisis in world history, is like gluttonous feasting in a glass house while surrounded by famine victims.

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Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Book Review)

Laura Goffman is a Ph.D. student in Middle East and North African History at Georgetown University. She also holds an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Her research focuses on the cultural and social dynamics of militarization in twentieth-century Oman. Check her out on Academia.edu.

Al-Ghonaimi, Sheikha. Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam. Maktaba ḍāmirī lilnashar wa at-tawzī‘. Sultana Oman, 2012.

The cover of Sheikha Al Ghonaimi’s 2012 novel Zanjibar: Wa Akfān min Rahim al’alam (Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain) is an outline of the map of Zanzibar, splattered haphazardly with blood-red blotches of paint, spilling from the island into the surrounding Indian Ocean. We learn in Ghonaimi’s introduction that this blood represents the Omanis of Zanzibar who were slaughtered during the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. This uprising led to the death and expulsion of thousands of Arabs and South Asians, including the Omani Sultan who had been placed at the head of a constitutional monarchy when the British Empire granted Zanzibar’s independence in 1963. He fled the island on his yacht—many others were not so fortunate.

While Ghonaimi’s narrative focus is on the social life and political events of Zanzibar, the orientation of her characters firmly remains in the Omani homeland. Ghonaimi structures her novel in the form of a letter written by her narrator, Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Harthy, to his older brother, whom he has not seen since he departed from Oman some 30 years earlier. Like many Omanis of the impoverished interior, the fictional Mohammed left Oman with his father in the early 1950s in search of greater prosperity in East Africa. Mohammed is only 8 years old when he and his father arrive in Zanzibar, and the first part of the novel is built around a child's nostalgia for an idealized home in Oman. The dramatic focus of this section is Mohammed's recollection of his mother's reluctance to agree to her youngest son's departure, and his father's persistence in convincing her that their son would benefit from learning the ways of trade. Guiltily, Mohammed describes his childish ignorance of the gravity and permanence of his departure, and his mother's rare display of tears as he left. His mother, we learn, has long since passed away, and he longs to have been able to tell her goodbye.

This melancholic nostalgia for his family colors Mohammed's depiction of life in Oman, which Ghonaimi describes, through the lens of his memories, as a pure and simple existence among an intimate circle. The predictable rhythm of trips to the mosque, agricultural work, and religious education structures Mohammed's early life. This Omani community emerges in his memory as majestic in its commitment to these daily rituals. For example, he describes his first trip to the mosque with his father, "I entered the mosque for the first time at dawn...there the men were as though they were illuminated...they were dressed in the Omani way, which reflected the purity of their hearts...it was beautiful to see human beings participating as angels in that atmosphere of spiritual purity" (17, quotations are my translations).

Some troubles do seep into Mohammed’s memories of this well-ordered world of Oman's interior: the father and the teacher both feel justified in beating mischievous children, who in turn harass Antoor, a homeless wanderer who lost his entire family in a fire that started while his wife was cooking. Also, clear hierarchies prevail, as girls cook and boys carry tools to work on the date farms, and Mohammed recalls his mother sadly reminding his aunt after she learns of Mohammed's approaching departure, "I had no say in the matter" (29). His aunt is horrified that her sister is forced to relinquish her youngest son, but the necessity of covering her face and retreating from view as the men arrive to take him away prevents her from expressing these feelings to Mohammed's father, so away they go, over the mountains with their caravan to catch a ship to Zanzibar.

The Omani community in Zanzibar is apparently close-knit and guards its communal privileges by maintaining a tight control over its network of families. Ghonaimi illustrates this protection of their own when Muhammad and his father arrive in Zanzibar as bedraggled immigrants, but are immediately taken up by Al Barwani, a prominent Omani merchant with an elegant home and a host of black servants. Mohammed and his father have no connection to Barwani except for their shared Arabic language and Omani heritage, but he becomes their willing patron and invites them to be his guests after Mohammed’s father asks him for help translating the Swahili spokenon the dock. Barwani supplies Mohammed with a black servant boy, Youssef, to teach him Swahili until he is proficient enough to enroll in the local school, and he helps Mohammed’s father to start a business.

Youssef becomes like family to Mohammad, yet he holds a separate status as a non-Arab “native”. For example, when Barwani first suggests that Mohammed learn Swahili from Youssef, his father worries about his son mixing with blacks.Barwani assures him, “Don’t worry, Youssef has been brought up in my house, and his manners and morals are excellent” (61). The implication here is that Youssef, despite his race, is an acceptable companion due to his cultivation in an Omani domestic setting. When violence erupts on the island in 1964, Youssef's family saves Mohammed, now 18, and his little brother, Ahmed. In an ultimate act of loyalty, Youssef decides to accompany Mohammed and Ahmed as they smuggle themselves off of the island in the storage cabin of a ship, and when Mohammed questions his willingness to leave his own family, Youssef asks him angrily, "How can you say that there is a price for friendship?" (127).

Friendship between a black former servant and an Omani immigrant may be priceless, but it does have its limitations: after they have reached Dar es Salaam, for example, Mohammed spots an older Omani woman on the docks, and switches from Swahili to Arabic. When Youssef protests that he does not understand, Mohammed replies that he is using Arabic because "I want her to feel that I am close to her" (156). Just as Barwani took in Mohammed and his father in Zanzibar, in Dar es Salaam Mohammed immediately forges a connection with an Omani he identifies by language and appearance. As Mohammed and his brother settle into another enclave of the Omani diaspora, only Youssef’s exceptional loyalty to Mohammed and his upbringing in Barwani’s household grant him entry to this community.

As Nate Mathews noted in another post on Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media, nostalgia for Oman's East African "empire" has become widespread in Omani media today. Ghonaimi adopts the standard points of this narrative. Through the voice of a minor character (a man who helps Mohammed and his companions to escape Zanzibar during the uprising), Ghonaimi offers an elaborate account of the history of Omanis in Zanzibar. The crucial points here are the propagation of Islam in East Africa through Omani efforts, the primitive nature of Africans before the Arab arrival (even alluding to acts of cannibalism), and the gracious, cultivating influence of the Omanis (138-139). The legacy of slavery is hardly mentioned, and after this historical rendition, Mohammed asks indignantly, "Why do the Omanis deserve all this pain in a country they improved so much?" (141). The answer to this query is at the didactic heart of the novel, and Ghonaimi assures us that the horrors of 1964 came about due to officious British colonizers and demagogic mainlanders (in the final section of the book, Mohammed even lists the names and crimes of specific political leaders), whose combined influence, she suggests, tragically disturbed the harmonious and cosmopolitan balance of pre-1964 Zanzibar.

The most engaging parts of Zanzibar: Shrouds from the Womb of Pain are Ghonaimi’s vivid descriptions of family and community life in Oman and Zanzibar. Here, her enthusiasm for Omani history and her sensitivity to the textures of daily life make for fascinating and compelling reading. Ghonaimi’sinsistence on Omani benevolence and victimhood in East Africa is, however, somewhat one-sided due to her reliance on racial and cultural stereotypes of "Africans" and to her neglect of the historical reverberations of slavery and ethnic chauvinism. Ultimately, these shortcomings are detrimental to her innovative attempt to use the epistolary novel and the complex power of memory to make some sense of the horrific violence of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

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Comparative African Diasporas: Towards a Thematic Reading List

Dear readers,

Some time ago, I compiled a bibliography for my exams on comparing Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas from Africa. I present here the rough list, in case folks would like to build on this work or utilize it for teaching or an exam question. The problem of comparisons are many, but the rewards when done well are potentially great. One major problem is that there is far more information on Atlantic African diasporas, and the literature is much more voluminous. On top of this, movement and migration in the Indian Ocean predates that in the Atlantic by several millenia. There is also a question of the usefulness of the terms "African" and "diaspora" in an Indian Ocean context. The following is far from a comprehensive list, and is especially weak on the enormous literature on the black Atlantic. I am not sure that "littoral culture" and "African creoles" belong together, but I wanted to give some sense of the parallel processes of identity making and their contexts in each basin.

Lots to chew on here, so happy reading!
-Nati

Framing piece:

Phillip Curtin. Why People Move: Migration in African History. Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, 1995.

Manning, Patrick. Migration in world history. New York: Routledge 2005.

Some general studies on African Diaspora:

Joseph Harris.” The dynamics of the Global African Diaspora.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993.

Oliver Bakewell. “In Search of the Diasporas Within Africa.” African Diaspora 1 (2008).

Katharina Schramm. “Leaving Area Studies Behind: The Challenge of Diasporic Connections in the Field of African Studies.”African and Black Diaspora 1(1): 2008.

Patrick Manning. The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. New York: Columbia University, 2009.

Dubois, Laurent & Julius Scott, eds.Origins of the Black Atlantic. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Isidore Okpewho, Ali Mazrui and Carole Davies.The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Michael Conniffand Thomas Davis. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. New York: St. Martens Press, 1994.

Segal,Ronald. The Black Diaspora.New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995.

Segal,Ronald. Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001.

Gilroy,Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Thornton,John. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Hamilton, Ruth Simms (ed.)Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007.

Palmer,Colin. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora.” The Journal of Negro History 85, No. 1/2 (Winter -Spring, 2000), pp. 27-32.

The African Studies Review.No. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora, Apr., 2000, pp. 1-202.

Thompson, Vincent Bakpetu. Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness and Leadership in the Americas (from Slavery to the 1920s). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.

Atlantic and Indian Ocean in Historical Context

Egerton, Douglas, Alison Games, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2007.

Bernard Bailyn. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Greene, Jack and Phillip Morgan. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Alison Games. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” AHR2006, Vol.111(3), pp.741-757. 

KärenWigen, Peregrine Horden, Nicholas Purcell, Alison Games, and Matt K. Matsuda,  “AHR  Forum:  Oceans  of  History,”  American Historical Review 111 (June 2006): 717-780.

K.N. Chaudhuri. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Sugata Bose. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Peter Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?”William and Mary Quarterly  63 (October 2006):725-742.

Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, eds. Eyes across the Water : Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha and Edward A. Alpers, eds. Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World. New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Alpers, Edward. East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2009.

Michael Pearson.The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Janet Abu-Lughod. Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350 AD. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, Special Issue: Oceans Connect (April 1999): 215-224.

Arasaratnam, S. “Recent Trends in the Historiography of the Indian Ocean, 1500 to 1800.”Journal of World History 1(2): Fall, 1990, 225-248.

Beaujard, Philippe “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth Century.”  Journal of World History 16(4): 2005, 411-465.

Regimes of labor/Labor Migration/Trade Migration

Marcus Rediker. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Lousisiana State University Press, 2008.

Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas.” American Historical Review 112.5 (December 2007): 1329–1358.

Simpson, Ed. Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh.

Ewald, Jan, et. "Crossers of the Sea: Slaves and Migrants in the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1800-1900." AHR 105(1): 2000, 69-91.

Ewald, Janet. “Bondsmen, Freedmen, and Maritime Industrial Transportation, c. 1840-1900.” Slavery and Abolition 31(3): Sept 2010, 451-466.

Campbell, Gwynn. “The African-Asian Diaspora: Myth or Reality? AAS 5: 3-4, 2006.

Hugh R. Clark. “Maritime Diasporas in Asia before da Gama: An Introductory Commentary.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49(4): 2006, 385-394.

Slavery/The Slave Trade

Walter Hawthorne. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Stephanie Smallwood. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

W.G. Smith, ed.The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Tradein the Nineteenth Century. London: Frank Cass, 1989.

Sparks, Randy J. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Edda L. Fields-Black. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Judith Carney. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Janet Ewald. "Slave Trade: The Indian Ocean, c1750-1880." Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, edited by Peter N. Stearns (Spring, 2008), Oxford University Press.

Gwyn Campbell, ed. The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia.London: Frank Cass, 2004.

Alpers, Edward, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, eds. Resisting Bondage in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Routledge, 2006.

Campbell, Gwyn, ed. Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa andAsia. London: Routledge, 2005.

Allen, Richard B. “The Constant Demand Of The French: The Mascarene Slave Trade And The Worlds Of The Indian Ocean And Atlantic During The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries.”Journal of African History, 49 (2008), 43–72.

Alpers, Edward A. “Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean world, c.1750–1962.” Slavery &Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 24(2): 2003, 51-68.

Pier Larson, "Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora," Journal of World History  19(4): 2008.

Kim Butler. “From Black History to Diasporan History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context.” African Studies Review 43(1): Special Issue on the Diaspora (Apr., 2000), 125-139.

Miller, Joseph C. “Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities  through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil.” In Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery, eds. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. 81–121.

Vernet, Thomas. "Slave trade and slavery on the Swahili coast (1500-1750)." In Slavery, Islam and Diaspora,edited by Paul Lovejoy, Behnaz A. Mirzai and Ismael M. Montana, 37-76. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. (Revised and expanded version of 2003 article.)

Vernet, Thomas. 2013 "East African Slave Migration." In Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, edited by I. Ness. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Littoral Culture/African Creoles

Michael N. Pearson. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

John K. Thornton.The Kongolese Saint Anthony : Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Africans in colonial Louisiana: the development of Afro-Creole culture in the eighteenth century.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece, eds. Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York : Palgrave Macmillan 2007

Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Shahan de Silva Jayasuriya.“Trading on a thalassic network: African migrations across the Indian Ocean.”International Social Science Journal 58(2): 2006, 215-225.

J. LorandMatory, “Introduction,” and “The English Professors of Brazil: Of the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation,”Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

Enseng Ho. The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Ed. John Hawley. India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Piers Larson.Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Paul C. Johnson. Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Erik Gilbert. “Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration,and Regional Unity, 1750-1970s.”The History Teacher 36(1): (Nov., 2002), 7-34.

Jane Landers.Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Linda Heywood and John Thornton.Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Lee Haring.“African Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean Islands.”Research in African Literatures 33(3): Autumn, 2002, 182-199.

Megan Vaughn. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius.Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds.Trans-Atlantic dimensions of ethnicity in the African diaspora.London ; New York : Continuum 2003.

African Return/African culture in Diaspora

Melville Herskovitz. The Myth of the Negro Past.Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 (1958).

Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.

Michael Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Ehud Toledano, ed. African Communities In Asia And The Mediterranean: Identities betweenIntegration andConflict. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012.

James Sweet. Domingos Alvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Alpers, Edward.“Recollecting Africa in the Indian Ocean World.”African Studies Review 43(1): 2000, 83-99.

Alpers, Edward. “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research.”Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And Middle East Bulletinxv(2),1997.

Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds.The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003.

J.A. Langley. Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Brent Edwards. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

McKnight, Kathryn J. and Leo J. Garafalo,  eds. Afro-Latin Voices: Narratives from the Early modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009.

Johnson, Paul Christopher. “On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The ‘BlackCaribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007): 174-211.

Rucker, Walter C. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Sidbury James. Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

 Catlin-Jairazbhoy,Amyand Edward A. Alpers. Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians. Noida, India: Rainbow Publishers, 2004.

Hanchard,Michael. “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture, No. 27, 1999, pp. 245-268.

Eshun, Ekow.Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa. New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2005.

Meriwether, James H. “Ghana: African Independence, 1957-1958,” Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Nelson, Gersham A., “Rastafarians and Ethiopianism,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Sidney Lemelle and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., pp. 66-84.

Lake,Obiagele.  “Toward a Pan-African Identity: Diaspora African Repatriates in Ghana.” Anthropological Quarterly 68(1): (Jan., 1995), 21-36.

Alpers,Edward and Vijaya lakshmi Teelock (eds.) History Memory and Identity. Mauritius: Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture ; University of Mauritius 2001.

Johnson, Robert Jr. Returning home : a century of African-American repatriation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press c2005

Kwasi Konadu. The Akan Diaspora in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press 2010.

Jayasuriya Shihan de Silva and Jean-Pierre Angenot. (eds.) Uncovering the history of Africans in Asia. Leiden ; Boston : Brill 2008.

Jayasuriya, Shihan de Silva.The African Diaspora in Asian trade routes and cultural memories. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

Young, Jason R. Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic religion in Kongo and the lowcountry South in the era of slavery.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Esedebe,P. Olisanwuche. Pan-Africanism : the idea and movement, 1776-1991. Washington, D.C. : Howard University 1994.

Kelley, Robin and Patterson, Tiffany Ruby .“Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.”African Studies Review43(1): 2000, 11-45.

Zeleza, Tiyambe. "African Diasporas: Toward a Global History.”African Studies Review 53(1): 2010, 1-19.

Zeleza, P.T. "Rewriting the African Diaspora Beyond the Black Atlantic." African Affairs 104(414): 2005, 35-68.

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