Overview - Dossier: Global Africa and African Diasporas: new perspectives for working with belonging, identities and cultural practices. (Mediações, vol. 30, n.3 – 2025/3)
Organizers: Karina Almeida de Sousa (UFM) and Hasani Elioterio dos Santos (UFSCar).
The dissemination and consolidation of the term "African diaspora" have played a fundamental role in constructing a comprehensive and diversified area of research and study in the humanities disciplines. The field of "African Diaspora Studies" emerged from the efforts of scholars to reexamine and reposition the experience of the dispersion of Africans and Blacks, initially in the New World and now globally. Among the leading scholars on the subject (WILLIAMS, 1999; MANNING, 2003; DAVIES, 2008), it is already accepted that the "African diaspora" gained prominence and conceptual status only from the 1950s onwards.
In a context driven by political currents that emerged in the context of the civil rights struggles in the United States and the national liberation movements in Africa, it was historians Joseph E. Harris and George Shepperson who first introduced the concept of the "African diaspora." This occurred during two conferences promoted by UNESCO: one at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, in Paris, in 1956, and another at the International Congress of African Historians, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in October 1965 (SILVÉRIO et al., 2020).
The Seminar held at the First African Diaspora Institute in 1979, organized by Joseph E. Harris at Howard University, presented the first edition of the anthology "Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora," in which, also for the first time, the semantic dimension of the diaspora concept was introduced. According to Harris (1994[1982]), the African diaspora represents "the global (voluntary and involuntary) dispersal of Africans throughout history; the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition; and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa" (HARRIS, 1994).
Ten years after the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, the 1st Festival Mondial Des Arts Nègres was held on the African continent in Dakar, Senegal. At this event, Brazil definitively inscribed itself on the paths of the African diaspora through an open letter sent by Abdias do Nascimento, which denounced the reasons, in his view, for the exclusion of his participation and the Experimental Theater of the Negro (TEN) in the Festival (SILVÉRIO et al., 2020).
The cultural practices of Africans and their descendants have been understood as spaces and dynamics capable of recreating the African continent in the Americas and the Caribbean in an inherently political manner. Thus, the arts, dance, and music can no longer be considered by social scientists as independent domains from the experiences of oppression, resistance, and overcoming of the colonial process; they contemporarily represent central spaces and dynamics in the analysis of the African diaspora in the global world.
These practices constitute transversal forms of identification. Analyzing and describing them from the perspective of African Diaspora Studies leads us to interpretations of these aesthetic expressions as spaces of diaspora manifestation, where the (re)creation of social ties occurs and the elaboration of a collective memory derived from the shared experience of slavery and the impediments imposed by racialization. Therefore, the practices are found in spaces of production of new meanings and significances that outline new ways of being, acting, and thinking associated with the African diaspora.
We can identify in the social, cultural, and political actions constructed in the interstices of colonial and racial violence the creation of new horizons of expectations oriented by the possibility of agglutination of Africans and their descendants in a network of global solidarity. These actions articulate both political practice and theoretical reflection in the human sciences; therefore, African Diaspora Studies and what Silvério (2022) has classified as "Black Transnationalism" point towards a cosmopolitanism that arises from rejection processes that occur within Empires and Nation States (NWANKWO, 1970; M'BAYE, 2017).
Thus, what we experience contemporarily in the Social Sciences can be interpreted as a confrontation/dispute for hegemony, in Gramscian terms, between a classical narrative that reduces humanity to a white, male, and Eurocentric view versus a reading that expands the notion of humanity and considers the experiences, cultural differences, and contributions of Africans, Asians, and indigenous peoples to the construction of knowledge about the human beyond the hierarchical imperatives of the Social Sciences, such as modernity and tradition; culture and nature; ethics and aesthetics, which translate what Stuart Hall (1992) called "West/Rest," the West and the rest of the world. In other words, it is not enough to reduce the subordination of one race to another in the collective social imagination. As social scientists, we have the commitment to build knowledge that is capable of connecting different human experiences and cultures and that generates a new consciousness and forms of valorization of humanity in its difference (Bhambra, 2014). This occurs, for example, when we consider African culture and its importance in the development of human history.
Working with the African diaspora as an analytical category offers the possibility of traversing and answering the question posed by Stuart Hall (2008), "Who needs identity?" This question allows us to demonstrate, through empirical examples, the importance of identification processes that take the empirical, political, and historical experience of the African diaspora in generating new ways of being, acting, and thinking. African Diaspora Studies also enable critical readings and interpretations of contemporaneity from the new dynamics of social life that result not from the countercultural movement of May 1968 that opposed forms of authority in France, from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and works on authoritarianism and the culture industry, or from liberal feminism and its relationship with the principle of equality (Collins, 2009).
The new dynamics that organize the current world, from the perspective of the African diaspora, are results of the processes of liberation of the African continent and a greater positive identification of Blacks from the New World with the African continent. It is from these considerations that the present thematic dossier proposal - Global Africa and African Diasporas: new perspectives for working with belonging, identities, and cultural practices - aims to present a selection of texts that dialogue with African diaspora studies and the global presence of Africans and their descendants. This proposal seeks to answer the following question: What are the theoretical and methodological challenges and shifts that the study of the cultural practices of Africans and their descendants, from the interpretative perspective of the African diaspora, can bring to the social sciences?
Regarding the process of selection and organization of the texts, we will prioritize research that adopts methodological approaches consolidated in the social sciences; however, we also consider works that articulate a variety of methodological resources, grounded in a multi-method approach. We will select texts considering the relation of the themes of the works with the African diaspora, that is, the selected works will be those that work with the diaspora as an analytical category that enables the understanding and interpretation of social phenomena, practices, and institutions. We intend for this dossier to be a reference in African Diaspora Studies in Brazil, presenting a set of relevant works and discussions for the disciplines of the social sciences.
The texts in the dossier will present readers with a diversity of empirical cases and life experiences that will be interpreted from the perspective of the African diaspora, so that the analysis can displace and tension aspects that are significant in the Social Sciences, such as the method
ological nationalism criticized by Ribeiro (2019) and Silvério (2022) as the emphasis on national space as the privileged term of analysis, the economic reductionism that dilutes the Black-African experience into a perspective of "class," as already observed by Stuart Hall (1980), and what Spillers (2006) classified as the "blindness" of Western culture, which is the imprisonment of scientific production and humanism in a single bias that does not fully recognize the contribution of Africans and their descendants to the history of humanity.
