Representations of Indian Ocean slavery

 So little work on African slavery in the Indian Ocean world is grounded with descendant communities. It would be great if more of this scholarship tried to trace descendants and their families (ala the work of Joseph Harris) instead of reproducing the logics of erasure in the colonial archives or simply fabulating that past from folklore and rumor, as does some recent literary work.

Moreover, reproducing and narrating in pornographic detail the degradation the enslaved experienced in elite households or in royal courts (as does a recently translated work by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin) to expose "silences" might be necessary for certain projects, but I am often left uncertain certain how much such work contributes to the collective empowerment of African descendants about their present in light of their past. The translators of the novel claim they are stepping outside the colonial gaze, seemingly without doing much study of how these representations of Oriental and Muslim monstrosity were key ideological justifications for European colonial intervention in East Africa.

Most recent scholarship on the subject seems more about the extension of projects of critical race coming from the west than it does about recovering lineages and attitudes of the formerly enslaved. Those two projects need not be contradictory, but in practice, because of the organizational dominance of the western critical race framework, such projects of recovery tend to turn into cul-de-sacs of western representation of the 'Orient'.

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Webinar Presentation: Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Modern Indian Ocean

A short and very basic introduction to how slavery and racism interrelate in the making of the modern world, particularly the societies of the Indian Ocean. This webinar was originally given to a virtual audience of students at Christ University in Bangalore.

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Teleologies of abolitionism in modern popular understandings of the history of Islam and Christianity

There are a lot of misleading teleologies in the modern appropriation of abolitionism by contemporary Muslim and Christian faith communities. In the eagerness to uncover an 'abolitionist' impulse in their religious past, one frequently observes scholarly and popular efforts to 'prove' that some Muslims or Christians abolished slavery before it became a global norm. There have also been many efforts to portray the founders of these religions themselves as abolitionists. This is complicated by the long history of warfare on the frontiers of Christian and Muslim states, which produced many slaves.

 While I appreciate efforts to uncover these 'lost' histories, I also think it is helpful to define what 'abolitionism' is and what it is not, in the interest of greater clarity about the past. Most Christian and Muslim faith communities have historically had strong prohibitions on enslaving co-religionists. This attitude had long coexisted with a tolerance of enslavement as punishment for being captured in a battle or a war. Prohibiting the capture and sale of co-religionists is not functionally equivalent to an abolitionist viewpoint, although it may have helped in certain ways and at certain times, to stimulate abolitionism's more universalist vision. The prohibition against selling or enslaving co-religionists did not extend to those outside of the 'civilization' created by these universalist faiths, or to the idea of slavery, ownership by another, as being inherently immoral.

 If prohibiting capture and sale of co-religionists was functionally equivalent to abolition, In fact the impulse to extend the name 'abolitionist' to anyone who tried to curtail or regulate the slave traffic of co-religionists, leads to logical and historical absurdities. Are we to regard Bathilde, wife of Clovis II, as an early abolitionist because she outlawed the traffic in Christian slaves in the Merovingian state? Is the Ethiopian emperor Gälawdéwos an abolitionist, for propagating an edict against the illegal slave trade in Christians in 1548? Were the slaveowning founders of the United States 'abolitionists' for banning the slave trade from Africa? I have similar doubts about labeling West African Muslim leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries who similarly tried to curtail the TRADE in CO-RELIGIONISTS, as abolitionists. I would distinguish between people who wanted to end the slave trade or who were outraged by its excesses, from the militant position of abolitionism. Perhaps this makes me a bit out of step with recent scholarly trends, which have tended to take a 'lumping' approach to the phenomenon of abolition, rather than the 'splitting' approach I favor.

 I have argued in the Journal of Global Slavery that abolitionism is a modern discourse with origins in the brutal regime of trans-Atlantic slavery and can only with great difficulty and inconsistency be mapped onto the further past of most faith communities. There is a nonviolent wing exemplified by Quakers, the Great Awakening, and the anti-slavery efforts of people like Olaudah Equiano and Otto Cugboana, as well as an armed resistance wing exemplified by Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sam Sharpe, the Haitian revolutionaries and the Bahian Muslim rebels. Abolitionism was not the natural working out of the 'inner logic' of the Abrahamic faiths, but a modern response to the contradictions in those discourses which had allowed slavery and the slave trade to continue to flourish. I think it is valuable to make these distinctions so we can gain a more sophisticated historical sense that, just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged as a response to, and was influenced by the Holocaust, the modern human rights revolution of abolitionism was a response to the brutalities of forced migration of Africans across the modern Atlantic, and was first and foremost a diasporic phenomenon of the Americas. My JGS article.

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Omar Suleiman on slavery in Islam

Great lecture by Sheikh Omar Suleiman.

I post it here, because it shows how brilliant people like Omar Suleiman can still be led into cognitive dissonance and unsustainable claims on this explosive issue. They know the Islamic sources with incredible erudition and expound them with clarity, but frequently go astray when engaging in comparative historical analysis.

 Here are some brief comments on the talk:

At 1:11:13 he states there were no ethical systems, before, during, or even for 700 years after the Prophet that, encouraged freeing slaves. Actually the Druze (a group which I doubt Omar Suleiman would claim as Muslim) abolished slavery in the 11th century. Also, the Sassanids (under the influence of Zoroastrianism, I believe) had before Islam elaborated a series of laws regulating treatment of slaves, and encouraging emancipation. Gregory of Nyassa, going much further than the Prophet Muhammad, and several hundred years before he lived, says: "...God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?" Because of these overlooked examples, I don't think Sheikh Omar Suleiman's particular historical claim can be sustained.

 Right after that he says, "we [as Muslims] only expand within permissible bounds." But if you apply that universally, there is nothing absolutely prohibiting slavery in the Quran or hadith. There is only 1)limits on treatment of slaves & 2) encouragement of manumission. There is nothing absolutely prohibiting slavery in the original sources of Christianity by the way.

 I am not convinced by his 'abolitionist' trajectory and invoking of the 'sunset clause' around 1:16. Presentism on this issue is fairly rampant in our community, and I think he is engaging in it here. Slavery didn't wither in Islam, after the death of the Prophet. In fact it grew as Islamic civilization grew. And its death was hastened not by the Prophet's call for manumission, but by radical abolitionists, western and non-western.

Suleiman's discussion of zakat immediately after thoroughly confuses the issue. He then follows up with an allusion to the world economy of the time being dependent on slavery, implying that Islamic civilization somehow ended that dependence. But the historical record is pretty clear that Islamic civilization increased the dependence of the world economy on slavery and significantly expanded the slave trade.

Finally, a word about the practice of manumission. We often view it as a liberal practice. But manumission also sustains slavery. It doesn't solve the root cause of inequality between people. More importantly, it can subtly encourage people to think that slaves will be a permanent part of the moral landscape, and thus divert more radical approaches to human equality by the enslaved themselves by saying that Muslim or Christian virtue is already attainable for slaves...ergo no need to be free! Nevertheless, I appreciate Sheikh Omar's attempt to sincerely deal with a difficult topic.
 

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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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Yasir Qadhi on slavery in Islam

Some thoughts on this thoughtful presentation from probably the most prominent Muslim traditionalist in America. I very much respect his attempts to engage this serious and important issue. Here are some points where I agree and where I disagree:

1. I appreciate how he tries to contextualize slavery, the terms for it, and the meaning of it in the context of different times. This is an important first step.

2. He is right that slavery (broadly understood) was a universal practice across many cultures globally.

3. He is incorrect that Islam was the first belief system to create rules about slavery. Not sure how he could claim this. He later claims that many other cultures had no 'rules' about slavery. Also incorrect.

4. He is also slightly in error about the 'legitimate' source of slaves in Islam. I think that is probably because he's focused on deriving notions of 'legitimacy' from text, rather than from actual practice. That is a long side debate which I will not take up here.

5. The virtues of manumission are frequently mentioned in the books of law. The interpretation we give to this practice, however, is KEY. See point 7.

6. I find the argument that, because there is no specific law legislating FOR slavery, therefore Muslims don't need it and can preserve the tradition intact...interesting. I'm not fully convinced, mainly because I don't think Qadhi has fully faced the historical and epistemological difficulties of this position.

7. I'm glad to see he raises this past disagreement among the ulama. But he studiously avoids the colonial context of abolition (I am sure he is aware of it, as he has spoken out on the impact of colonialism on Muslims before). This silence is curious. If Qadhi is a traditionalist, and he follows the pious ancestors, then what right does he have to call abolition 'more humane' than previous practices? How can he avoid that abolition was almost always and everywhere forced on Muslim countries by colonial invaders? Finally, we should ask ourselves, how does Qadhi know the INTENTION (his word) of Allah apart from The Quran and the actual practice of the early community? The companions took female captives as slaves or sex slaves (there are plenty of documented instances of this in the hadith tradition). By most accounts, even the Prophet practiced this. Isn't Qadhi saying that the generation of Muslims now who have gotten rid of slavery know better than the early Salaf and the Prophet did, since the later generations were the one to fulfill what he claims is the internal logic of the tradition? I would like to know more about how Qadhi would square this with his veneration for the early companions, and the Prophet himself.

8. I have said it once, and I will say it again: The abolitionist hermeneutic is a modernist hermeneutic. And once you have accepted a modernist 'logic' of history where you believe (as Qadhi seems to here, though implicitly) that history has moved progressively towards abolishing a practice that the early companions openly practiced without sanction, then you have rendered most articulations of traditionalism anachronistic. Progressive history makes a lot of traditionalists nervous, because it undermines their absolutist claims to an 'ethical ground'. Keep this in mind whenever traditionalists accuse liberals of undermining the basis of a 'traditional' Islamic ethics. More often than not the 'tradition' they practice is as modern and anachronistic as anything Muslim progressives have yet dreamed of.

9. I say all of this, not to beat a tired old dead horse, but because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and emotional polemics on both sides of this issue. We need more clear sighted analysis. I think Qadhi himself might benefit from a serious engagement with scholars working on the links between slavery and law, both in Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts.

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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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