The Challenges of Studying the African

The field of African diaspora studies has grown rapidly in recent years. What accounts for this? What are the current preoccupations of African diaspora studies and their limits? Who dominates the field and how can African scholars help reshape it? These are of course broad and difficult questions which cannot be adequately dealt with in a paper of this size. Suffice it to say answers lie as much in the shifting dynamics of knowledge production as in the changing contours of material production, in transformations that are simultaneously epistemic as they are economic, that are confined to and connect the academy and society, that are often as much national as they are transnational. In short, the rise ofAfrican diaspora studies can be attributed to, on the one hand intellectual and ideological imperatives, and on the other to developments in regional and global political economies. Intellectually, the growth of diaspora studies was facilitated from the 1980s by the rise of globalization and transnational studies as well as cultural studies and especially the ‘posts ’ – poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.Also critical was the growth of interest in world history following multiculturalist assaults on th