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The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World Edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 455. $70.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.
Editors Toyin Falola and Matt Childs make an important contribution to the study of the African diaspora and the Atlantic world with this new volume of essays. Falola, a scholar of African history, and Childs. a historian of the African diaspora in Cuba, frame this work as a case study that offers insights into the historical processes that shaped the larger diasporic population. They organize the book into four sections centered on the Yoruba in Africa, the diaspora in the Americas, the culture of the diaspora, and the return of Yoruba people to their homeland. By bringing together scholars from four continents and a range of disciplines to explore the history and culture of the Yoruba diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, they have bridged the ocean in two important ways.
In the first section of the book David Eltis, Paul Lovejoy, and Ann O'Hear create a portrait of the Yoruba people and the processes that created the diaspora. Eltis provides a focus on the scope...