Abstract: This introduction explores the major themes addressed in this special issue, particularly how racial difference both structures the African diaspora and informs how scholars exploring this social formation engage with modes of knowledge production that reshape diaspora. In this way, the introduction considers how the local, the nation, remains an important site for the construction of African diasporic identity and outlines how such nations at times facilitate diasporic imaginaries.

Abstract: This article critically examines a common premise of racial discourse in contemporary multiracial societies: that ethnic data collection, in the form of population statistics, is necessary for the apprehension and eradication of discrimination. Drawing on ethnographic data from the conduct of the 1991 National Census of the United Kingdom--the first ever to include a direct question on ethnicity--I analyze the myriad dimensions of racialized power and subjectivity at work in demographic knowledge production. In the process, I suggest that the 1991 census reveals less about people's racial or ethnic identity, per se, than it does about the contradictory racial identities of the British state itself. These become visible both in terms of state practices with regard to race and in terms of the myriad ways that black people represent the state, appeal to it, resist it, or embody it.

Abstract: The project of recovering the history of the Negro Leagues, and in so doing establishing a more complete account of U.S. professional baseball's segregated past, is fertile ground for interrogating the possibilities and limitations of diasporic frameworks. This article examines the problem of the color line in baseball and interrogates how the writing of black baseball history--itself a revision of the traditional narrative of U.S. professional baseball--has often obfuscated the place of Afro-Latinos. Rather than examining the history of African Americans and Latinos in baseball as two distinct strands, my approach endeavors to complicate our understanding of racialization, transnational history, and diaspora by focusing on their participation in this circuit where their professional aspirations overlapped and intersected. Specifically, as a means to discuss the place of Afro-Latinos within baseball history then and now, this article revisits the public outrage at the "snubbing" of Buck O'Neil along with the more muted reaction to Afro-Latino Orestes "Minnie" Miñoso not being elected in a special Hall of Fame election in 2006. The varied reactions provide an opportunity to engage popular narratives about black baseball history, the place of Afro-Latinos within baseball history, and the study of the African diaspora within the Americas. The focus on the treatment of Afro-Latinos within these narratives, I argue, illuminates a selective revision of baseball's racial history, one that minimizes the impact on and contributions of Afro-Latinos and also diminishes the international and transnational dimensions to the struggle to overturn racial segregation in U.S. professional baseball.

Abstract: This article engages the scholarly discussion of the booming heritage tourism industry in Ghana to explore the dynamics and politics of historical and contemporary African-diasporic interactions and provoke a critical revision of diaspora theory. I argue that Ghanaian-diaspora interactions in Ghana occur within a broader sociopolitical and cultural terrain that is not limited to heritage tourism. This terrain is configured through Ghana's own historical trajectory and narratives around slavery and race which, in turn, are informed and renegotiated by the country's relationship with diaspora history and community over time. Black diaspora and other African visitors, expatriates, and professionals converge in Ghana's cosmopolitan centers and confront a local landscape that is at once familiar and jarring because it has distinct and similar articulations of race and Blackness. My argument forces an explicit recognition of local processes of racialization in Ghana and calls for an approach to Ghanaian-diasporic interactions that juxtaposes Ghanaian racial subjectivity to that of diaspora bBlacks. By framing the heritage tourism discussion in this way, I hope to demonstrate that, contrary to conventional treatment of Africa within diaspora theory, transnational interactions between Africa and its diaspora are both historical and contemporary and, more importantly, are marked by the integument of race.

Abstract: When and where do we "see" the emergence of a black German subject? Where do we encounter a visual instantiation of a black subject who is internal to German society and partakes of a relationship to this society that is neither transplanted, transitional, nor transitory, but instead firmly grounded within it? In early-twentieth-century Germany, one important site where this subject emerges is through the medium of photography--specifically, black German family photography. Often considered one of the most mundane forms of photographic imaging, family photos function as a complex site of black European diasporic formation. This essay analyzes a series of images that register blacks as Europeans, yet framed through the lens of national and familial idioms that presents them as undeniable members of German society. In so doing, the article highlights both the tensions of diasporic formation, as well as the coconstitution of racial and gendered subjects therein.

Abstract: This essay examines how diasporic commonalities are experienced in the midst of cultural and linguistic difference by highlighting the making of Afro-diasporic linkages by participants in the Harlem Renaissance and the Afro-Cubanism (afrocubanismo) movement. The essay interprets the traffic between the cultural movements in Harlem and Havana as evidence of diasporization, rather than as mere background information for two distinct national movements. In the 1920s and 1930s, the boundary-crossing activity of African American and Afro-Cuban writers and musicians, such as Langston Hughes and Mario Bauzá, and the reception by their audiences produced new hierarchal and relational understandings of Afro-diasporic cultures in both countries. Cubans celebrated Hughes as a representative of the most advanced sector of the global "colored race." At the same time, Hughes played a decisive role in the construction of Afro-Cuban culture as more authentically "African." Although these views were suffused with projections, they illustrate some of the ways African-descended writers, musicians, and their audiences in Cuba and the United States articulated a shared diasporic imagination. Moreover, the essay highlights audience reaction to the music and literature produced by the movements and argues that expressions of affect or feelings were powerful ways that Afro-diasporic linkages were established across cultural difference.