Working The Diaspora

From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean. Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.

In Downwardly Global Lalaie Ameeriar examines the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women to Toronto. Despite being trained professionals in fields including engineering, law, medicine, and education, they experience high levels of unemployment and poverty. Rather than addressing this downward mobility as the result of bureaucratic failures, in practice their unemployment is treated as a problem of culture and racialized bodily difference. In Toronto, a city that prides itself on multicultural inclusion, women are subjected to two distinct cultural contexts revealing that integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the celebration of some differences and the eradication of others. Downwardly Global juxtaposes the experiences of these women in state-funded unemployment workshops, where they are instructed not to smell like Indian food or wear ethnic clothing, with their experiences at cultural festivals in which they are encouraged to promote these same differences. This form of multiculturalism, Ameeriar reveals, privileges whiteness while using race, gender, and cultural difference as a scapegoat for the failures of Canadian neoliberal policies.

This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

"An appreciative and user-friendly book on religion in the African diaspora. Murphy's skillfully drawn portraits offer an inviting introduction to the religious worlds of Vodou, Candomble, Santeria, Revival Zion, and the Black Church" – David W. Wills, Amherst College

This publication does not just mark the presence of black people in Europe, but brings research to a new stage by making connections across Europe through the experience of work and labour. The working experience for black peoples in Europe was not just confined to ports and large urban areas – often the place black people are located in the imagination of the European map both today and historically. Work took place in small towns, villages and on country estates. Until the 1800s enslaved Africans would have worked alongside free blacks and their white peers. How were these labour relations realised be it on a country estate or a town house? How did this experience translate into the labour movements of the twentieth century? These are some of the questions the essays in this collection address, contributing to new understandings of European life both historically and today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

This book addresses the conceptual difficulties and political contestations surrounding the applicability of the term "African-Canadian". In the midst of this contested terrain, the volume focuses on first generation, Black Continental Africans who have immigrated to Canada in the last four decades, and have traceable genealogical links to the continent.

Patrick Manning follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In joining these stories, he shows how the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean fueled dynamic interactions among black communities and cultures and how these patterns resembled those of a number of connected diasporas concurrently taking shaping across the globe. Manning begins in 1400 and traces the connections that enabled Africans to mutually identify and hold together as a global community. He tracks discourses on race, changes in economic circumstance, the evolving character of family life, and the growth of popular culture. He underscores the profound influence that the African diaspora had on world history and demonstrates the inextricable link between black migration and the rise of modernity. Inclusive and far-reaching, The African Diaspora proves that the advent of modernity cannot be fully understood without taking the African peoples and the African continent into account.

The word ‘diaspora’ has leapt from its previously confined use – mainly concerned with the dispersion of Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Africans away from their natal homelands – to cover the cases of many other ethnic groups, nationalities and religions. But this ‘horizontal’ scattering of the word to cover the mobility of many groups to many destinations, has been paralleled also by ‘vertical’ leaps, with the word diaspora being deployed to cover more and more phenomena and serve more and more objectives of different actors. With sections on ‘debating the concept’, ‘complexity’, ‘home and home-making’, ‘connections’ and ‘critiques’, the Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies is likely to remain an authoritative reference for some time. Each contribution includes a targeted list of references for further reading. The editors have carefully blended established scholars of diaspora with younger scholars looking at how diasporas are constructed ‘from below’. The adoption of a variety of conceptual perspectives allows for generalization, contrasts and comparisons between cases. In this exciting and authoritative collection over 40 scholars from many countries have explored the evolving use of the concept of diaspora, its possibilities as well as its limitations. This Handbook will be indispensable for students undertaking essays, debates and dissertations in the field.