Work theorizing the African diaspora has sought to identify its defining characteristics, map out lines of continuity between its geographic segments, and outline methodological approaches to studying the dispersion of African descended populations. This work has resulted in studies of cultural exchange, migration, the social structure of various Afro-diasporic communities, as well as political activism within those communities. Recent scholarship, however, has devoted greater analytical attention to the question of difference -- how diasporas emerge through "relations of difference," thus opening up the necessary space for thinking about 

difference as a central feature of diaspora rather than a problem one must solve. Difference draws attention to how diaspora, as a social formation, is simultaneously framed by relationships of domination and is itself a structured hierarchy. Thus, the claim by Kachig Tölölyan that the African diaspora is exceptional precisely because of the history of racialization in this particular formation suggests the need for more work on racial difference in diaspora. What stands out most about the African diaspora is not merely that the process of racialization was central to and concomitant with dispersion, but that dispersion involved multiple racial formations that rendered large segments of African-descended populations in places like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Lusophone Africa, and Europe something other than black. The unique racial formations within which these populations exist complicate thinking about diaspora as a community and call into question the assumption of a correspondence between African diaspora and blackness. Indeed, work on the dissimilarities between the blackness of Africans, African Caribbeans, and African Americans has alluded to the need for a serious examination of this question. Given the connections between blackness, racial identity, racial ideology, and racial hierarchies in what philosopher Charles W. Mills calls "global white supremacy," attention to intradiasporic racial difference offers to open new realms of inquiry into diaspora as a transnational social formation by focusing on the inability of race to translate easily across historical and national contexts.