Reconceptualizing African Diasporas: Notes from a Historian

This commentary interrogates Clarke’s paper on African diasporas. It argues that though Clarke seeks to open new analytical lenses on African diasporas by focusing on postslavery African diasporas, it does not advance the scholarship on the subject because of its limited conceptions of Africa and the global dimensions of African diasporas. As is common in Eurocentric African studies, ‘‘Africa’’ is seen as coterminous with sub-Saharan Africa, and Clarke universalizes the historiesofAfro-Atlantic diasporato the histories of Afro-European and Afro-Asian diasporas. Her notion of humanitarian diasporas also limits the scope of the engagements between Africa and its diasporas. My commentary tries to offer an alternative historiography of the global dimensions of African diasporas