Toyin Falola 
The African Diaspora 
Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization

The African diaspora is arguably the most important event in modern African history. From the fifteenth century to the present, millions of Africans have been dispersed — many of them forcibly, others driven by economic need or political persecution–to other continents, creating large communities with African origins living outside their native lands. The majority of these communities are in North America. This historic displacement has meant that Africans are irrevocably connected to economic and political developments in the West and globally. Among the known legacies of the diaspora are slavery, colonialism, racism, poverty, and underdevelopment, yet the ways in which these same factors worked to spur the scattering of Africans are not fully understood — by those who were part of this migration or by scholars, historians, and policymakers.

In this definitive study of the diaspora in North America, Toyin Falola offers a causal history of the western dispersion of Africans and its effects on the modern world. Reengaging old and familiar debates and framing new ones that enrich the discourse surrounding Africa, Falola isolates the thread, running nearly six centuries, that connects the history of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and current migrations. A boon to scholars and policymakers and accessible to the general reader, the book exploresdiverse narratives of migration and shows that the cultures that migrated from Africa to the Americas have the capacity to unite and create a new pan-Africanist movement within the globalized world.


Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the 2011 recipient of the Distinguished Africanist Award from the African Studies Association and serves as the vice president of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. His previous books published by the University of Rochester Press include
The Power of African Cultures and
Nationalism and African Intellectuals.

Tabla de materias

Introduction: The Old and New African Diaspora

Africa and Slavery in a Transnational Context

The Slave Mutiny of 1839: The Colonization of Memory and Spaces

The Centralization of Africa and the Intellectualization of Blackness

Communalism, Africanism, and Pan-Africanism

Atlantic Yoruba and the Expanding Frontiers of Yoruba Culture and Politics

Politics, Slavery, Servitude, and the Construction of Yoruba Identity

Orisa Music, Dance, and Modernity

Western Education and Transatlantic Connections

Africa in the Diaspora and the Diaspora in Africa: Toward an Integrated Body of Knowledge

Tanure Ojaide and Akin Ogundiran: Knowledge Circulation and the Diasporic Interface

Nollywood and the Creative World of Aderonke Adesola Adesanya: The African Impact on Global Cultures

Globalization and Contemporary Cultures

Postscript: United States Foreign Policy on Africa in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sobre el autor

TOYIN FALOLA is Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.