This volume draws attention to the plight of urban blacks in the contemporary world and links their situation across five key global regions. It argues that while the world's population is predominantly urban, persons of African descent are disproportionately urbanized and impoverished, and it shows how significant changes in the global arena, among them new information technology, the increased hegemony of market structures, and the resulting socioeconomic instability, have altered the material circumstances of these and other poor and working-class urban dwellers. The book argues further that although the problems triggered by the late-twentieth-century challenge appear to impact blacks uniformly, the societal and cultural-specific dimensions of their plight should not be overlooked. Its findings and implications buttress the need for greater unity among urban blacks in the diaspora, as well as offer solutions that are sensitive to their societal and cultural differences.

Despite the economic utopianism brought on by globalization, effective solutions to the persistent plight of urban blacks throughout the African diaspora continue to elude scholars, politicians, and community leaders. Charles Green brings a decade of research and original fieldwork in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States to investigate the interface of the historic racism faced by these urban communities and contemporary trends of globalization. Green pays particular attention to the condition of the youth, whose aspirations, vulnerabilities, and insights into their own conditions are central to the future prospects for their communities as a whole. Considering the impacts of economic restructuring and cultural diffusion alike, his analysis asserts the importance of both global ties and local distinctiveness. Ultimately, Manufacturing Powerlessness aims to encourage the formation of alliances throughout the diaspora so that urban black communities can manufacture a future of empowerment. Visit the author's web page

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 explores diverse 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.

This work sets forth the argument that in the age of (neoliberal) globalization, black people around the world are ever-so slowly becoming “African-Americanized”. They are integrated and embourgeoised in the racial-class dialectic of black America by the material and ideological influences of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism as promulgated throughout the diaspora by two social class language games of the black American community: the black underclass (Hip-Hop culture), speaking for and representing black youth practical consciousness; and black American charismatic liberal/conservative bourgeois Protestant preachers like TD Jakes, Creflo Dollar, etc., speaking for and representing the black bourgeois (educated) professional and working classes. Although on the surface the practical consciousness and language of the two social class language games appear to diametrically oppose one another, the authors argue, given the two groups’ material wealth within the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism of corporate (neoliberal) America, they do not. Both groups have the same underlying practical consciousness, subjects/agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The divergences, where they exist, are due to their interpellation, embourgeoisement, and differentiation via different ideological apparatuses of the society: church and education, i.e., schools, for the latter; and prisons, the streets, and athletic and entertainment industries for the former. Contemporarily, in the age of globalization and neoliberalism, both groups have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination in black neoliberal America, and are antagonistically, converging the practical consciousness of the black or African diaspora towards their respective social class language games. We are suggesting that the socialization of other black people in the diaspora ought to be examined against and within the dialectical backdrop of this class power dynamic and the cultural and religious heritages of the black American people responsible for this phenomenon or process of convergence we are referring to as the “African-Americanization” of the black diaspora.

Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of "black America" on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the "New South Africa." They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls' fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations. Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

Re-engaging the African Diasporas: Pan-Africanism in the Age of Globalization is the second volume in the Kwame Nkrumah International Conference series, and brings together twenty selected papers presented at the Third Kwame Nkrumah International Conference held at Kwantlen Polytechnic University on August 19-21, 2014. Two premises inform this volume: (1) If the history of slavery and its vestiges divided and continue to divide the continent and its Diasporas, modern technology should be harnessed to bridge that divide, and (2) the continent’s development is a boon to the development of what the African Union has dubbed Africa’s “Sixth Region”. The book threads together papers that seek to give academic and intellectual impetus to tie the continent’s development to that of the African Diaspora. The goal is to end the inertia and inward-looking on the part of scholars and academics in both Africa and “African International” or “Global Africa,” and re-engage one another in more productive ways. By harnessing the enormous resources available in our internet age and riding the cresting wave of globalization, the task of re-engagement will be vastly enhanced, and the debates and discussions in this volume will serve to facilitate this re-engagement. A main highlight of the conference was a special tribute to Nelson Mandela to honour his death in December, 2013 and celebrate 20 years of South African independence. In these papers, scholars examine Mandela’s role in the transition of South Africa from a racist state to a democratic nation. They critically examine how the ANC’s policies have impacted post-Apartheid South Africa and question what alternatives remain for the future.

Global Circuits of Blackness is a sophisticated analysis of the interlocking diasporic connections between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. A diverse and gifted group of scholars delve into the contradictions of diasporic identity by examining at close range the encounters of different forms of blackness converging on the global scene. Contributors examine the many ways blacks have been misrecognized in a variety of contexts. They also explore how, as a direct result of transnational networking and processes of friction, blacks have deployed diasporic consciousness to interpellate forms of white supremacy that have naturalized black inferiority, inhumanity, and abjection. Various essays document the antagonism between African Americans and Africans regarding heritage tourism in West Africa, discuss the interaction between different forms of blackness in Toronto's Caribana Festival, probe the impact of the Civil Rights movement in America on diasporic communities elsewhere, and assess the anxiety about HIV and AIDS within black communities. The volume demonstrates that diaspora is a floating revelation of black consciousness that brings together, in a single space, dimensions of difference in forms and content of representations, practices, and meanings of blackness. Diaspora imposes considerable flexibility in what would otherwise be place-bound fixities. Contributors are Marlon M. Bailey, Jung Ran Forte, Reena N. Goldthree, Percy C. Hintzen, Lyndon Phillip, Andrea Queeley, Jean Muteba Rahier, Stéphane Robolin, and Felipe Smith.