African Digital Diasporas: Technologies, Tactics, and Trends

Abstract

Diasporas have a long history. The essence of diaspora is some form of displacement coupled with relations of belonging and identification that link members of a diaspora to each other and to a shared origin (Braziel and Mannur 2007). In the case of African diasporas, their long history stems largely from the European enslavement and transport of Africans from the continent to the Americas. The term ‘African diaspora’, therefore, has generally been understood to refer to the well-established populations of African descent in the Western hemisphere whose ties to particular places, communities, or institutions on the continent had been severed by force and subsequently lost. An unintended effect of this construction of African diaspora was that it rendered invisible Africans who left Africa more recently and established themselves on other continents. As Kamari Clarke (2010: 48) observes this has been changing as “scholars have extended the terrain of African American and Africana studies by creating a widening field of engagement that makes the Africa in ‘African American’ present”. As Clarke’s formulation suggests, longstanding notions of African diaspora also centered on American racialised experiences. These views have been shifting as scholars and publics increasingly recognise the diversity and extent of African diasporas around the globe (Pitts 2019; Alves 2018; Winders 2007; Gilroy 1993). The meanings and implications of the concept of ‘African diaspora’, thus, are complex, contested, and evolving (Kamel 2011; Rahier et al 2010; Zeleza 2010; Okpewho and Nzegwu 2009). Over the past decade, however, the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ in Europe and the media circulation of images showing Africans at risk or drowned in the Mediterranean, languishing in makeshift camps at Calais, and other scenes of