African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States

Scholars of the African Americas are segregated from one another by region or period, by language, and by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thought as part of a much greater whole. Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. This volume offers a window into the enormous diversity and depth of intellectual and artistic production arising from the Middle Passage, and a call for new, more collaborative and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.