Short Abstract

This panel asks what it means to study African diaspora critically. It examines how diaspora is defined and understood, and what its boundaries reveal about the assumptions built into the category itself.

Long Abstract

What does it mean to study African diaspora critically? Rather than taking diaspora as a self-evident category, this panel asks how it has been defined, how its boundaries have been drawn, and what kinds of social worlds those definitions make visible. It is concerned not simply with diasporic populations, but with diaspora as a category of knowledge.

This means asking what has come to count as African diaspora, and why. The term often carries an implicit geography in which Africa appears as a point of origin and diaspora as something located elsewhere. Yet movement within the continent, changing borders, and forms of belonging that do not fit neatly within ideas of homeland and dispersal complicate this picture. Such cases do more than expand the category: they raise questions about the assumptions through which diaspora has become thinkable in the first place.

A critical approach must also consider the relationship between diaspora as an analytical category and the ways people understand their own movement, attachments, and belonging. When is diaspora a meaningful description of social experience, and when might other ways of understanding those relationships be more appropriate? What are the political dimensions of defining particular forms of movement and belonging as diasporic?

In keeping with African Prisms, this panel invites contributions that use empirical or theoretical work to interrogate the concept of diaspora itself, asking how different perspectives might unsettle its boundaries and reconfigure what African diaspora can mean.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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