Content area
Full Text
The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization. By Toyin Falola. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013. Pp. xiv, 481; maps, photographs, bibliography, index. $ 100.00.
The indefatigable Toyin Falola has now produced a set of essays on the African diaspora, focusing especially on how the earlier diaspora has been overlaid by a new diaspora from Africa. The insightful introduction, entitled "Old and New African Diaspora," sets the two great waves of transnational migration in relation to each other, identifying the modem networks that come out of them. Principal emphasis is on modem identities, especially the New African Diaspora as exemplified by the interaction of Nigeria and the new Yoruba diaspora in the United States
The work addresses a general audience: all who interact with the New Diaspora and especially cosmopolitan Africans at home and abroad. The author draws on his distinctive experience as a scholar and facilitator of scholarship on Africa. Falola, in addition to his several monographs on Nigeria in recent generations, has edited and co-edited some sixty volumes on recent African history and on Africa in the world. The volumes result especially from the many conferences he has organized at the University of Texas and in Nigeria. These publications highlight his own contributions yet reveal equally the diaspora-based networks of scholarship, cultural production, and enterprise within which he moves. Falola shows, implicitly, how he and...