The African academic diaspora in the United States and Africa: The challenges of productive engagement

The African academic diaspora, however defined, has never been larger than it is now, and it continues to grow rapidly. According to some estimates, since 1990 an average of 20,000 highly educated Africans, among them academics, have been migrating to the global North every year. That much is clear, but far less so are the causes, courses, and consequences of this expansion, specifically the implications for knowledge production in and on Africa. Depending on one's developmentalist anxieties, globalist or cosmopolitan affectations, Pan-Africanist aspirations, or analytical predispositions toward international skilled labor migration (the "brain drain" of popular and policy discourse), the academic diaspora can be seen as either a liability depriving Africa of desperately needed professionals trained at enormous cost, or an asset providing the continent crucial connections to the global North that can facilitate transfers of capital (technological, financial, cultural and political), and help mediate, in terms of knowledge production, the globalization of African scholarship and the Africanization of global scholarship