This book uncovers the reality that new African immigrants now represent a significant force in the configuration of American polity and identity especially in the last forty years. Despite their minority status, African immigrants are making their marks in various areas of human endeavor and accomplishments-from academic, to business, to even scientific inventions. The demographic shift is both welcome news as well as a matter for concern given the consequences of displacement and the paradoxes of exile in the new location. By its very connection to the 'Old African Diaspora,' the notion of a 'New African Diaspora' marks a clear indication of a historical progression reconnecting continental Africa with the New World without the stigma of slavery. Yet, the notion of trans-Atlantic slavery is never erased when the African diaspora is mentioned whether in the old or new world. Within this paradoxical dispensation, the new African diaspora must be conceived as the aftermath of a global migration crisis.

This book argues that a new cadre of African immigrants are finding themselves in the New World-mostly well educated, high-income earning professionals, and belonging to the category termed "African brain drain," they constitute the antinomy of those Africans who were forcibly removed from Africa during slavery. Along with this sense of freedom and voluntary migration comes a paradox-that of living in two worlds and negotiating the pleasures and agonies that come with living in exile. For the new African immigrant, the primary factor motivating migration is the desire for a better life whether fleeing political persecution, economic crisis, refugee crisis, or a combination thereof. The overall consequences include displacement, alienation, and the not so enchanting reality of exile. In its encompassing structure and multivalent perspectives, Trans-Atlantic Migration sets in motion the shifting theoretical and pragmatic verity that the new African diaspora and transatlantic migrations are paths laden with paradoxes that only time, negotiations, compromises, and sense of identities can ultimately resolve.

In an era of globalization, population growth, and displacements, migration is now a fact of life in a constantly shifting economic and political world order. This book contributes to the discourse on the beneficiaries, benefactors, and the casualties of African displacement. While the few existing studies have emphasized economic motivation as the primary factor triggering African migration, this volume treats a range of issues: economic, socio-political, pedagogical, developmental, and cultural. Organized with a multidisciplinary thrust in mind, this book argues that any discussion of African migration, whether internal or external, must be conceived as only one aspect of a more complex, organic, and global patterning of "flux and reflux" necessitated by constantly shifting dynamics of world socio-economic, cultural, and political order.

This book uncovers the reality that new African immigrants now represent a significant force in the configuration of American polity and identity especially in the last forty years. Despite their minority status, African immigrants are making their marks in various areas of human endeavor and accomplishments-from academic, to business, to even scientific inventions. The demographic shift is both welcome news as well as a matter for concern given the consequences of displacement and the paradoxes of exile in the new location. By its very connection to the 'Old African Diaspora, ' the notion of a 'New African Diaspora' marks a clear indication of a historical progression reconnecting continental Africa with the New World without the stigma of slavery. Yet, the notion of trans-Atlantic slavery is never erased when the African diaspora is mentioned whether in the old or new world. Within this paradoxical dispensation, the new African diaspora must be conceived as the aftermath of a global migrationcrisis.

This book argues that a new cadre of African immigrants are finding themselves in the New World-mostly well educated, high-income earning professionals, and belonging to the category termed "African brain drain," they constitute the antinomy of those Africans who were forcibly removed from Africa during slavery. Along with this sense of freedom and voluntary migration comes a paradox-that of living in two worlds and negotiating the pleasures and agonies that come with living in exile. For the new African immigrant, the primary factor motivating migration is the desire for a better life whether fleeing political persecution, economic crisis, refugee crisis, or a combination thereof. The overall consequences include displacement, alienation, and the not so enchanting reality of exile. In its encompassing structure and multivalent perspectives, Trans-Atlantic Migration sets in motion the shifting theoretical and pragmatic verity that the new African diaspora and transatlantic migrations are paths laden with paradoxes that only time, negotiations, compromises, and sense of identities can ultimately resolve.

In an era of globalization, population growth, and displacements, migration is now a fact of life in a constantly shifting economic and political world order. This book contributes to the discourse on the beneficiaries, benefactors, and the casualties of African displacement. While the few existing studies have emphasized economic motivation as the primary factor triggering African migration, this volume treats a range of issues: economic, socio-political, pedagogical, developmental, and cultural. Organized with a multidisciplinary thrust in mind, this book argues that any discussion of African migration, whether internal or external, must be conceived as only one aspect of a more complex, organic, and global patterning of "flux and reflux" necessitated by constantly shifting dynamics of world socio-economic, cultural, and political order.

Ile Aiye's unifying identity politics through Afro-Carnival performance, is embedded in its dialectical relationship with the rest of Brazil as it takes ownership of its oppressed status by striving for racial equality and economic empowerment. Against this complex background, performative theory offers significant new meanings. In ritualistically integrating Bakhtinian categories of free interaction, eccentric behavior, carnivalistic misalliances, and the sacrilegious, Ile Aiye anchors its social discourse on showcasing the black race as a critical agency of beauty, pride, wisdom, subversion, and negotiation. Ile Aiye carnival is not only racially conscious, it heightens the conflicts by dislocating the very establishment that invests in its cultural politics. In fusing the sacred, the profane, the performative, the musical, with the political, Ile Aiye succeeds in indicting racism, ironically sacrificing the very power it pursues. Despite these limitations, Ile Aiye creatively engages alternative dialogues on Brazilian politics through sponsored performances across transnational borders.

An interdisciplinary study on the myth of racial democracy in Brazil through the prism of producers of Afro-Brazilian culture. Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power. In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time. Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts. Niyi Afolabi teaches Luso-Brazilian, Yoruba, and African Diaspora studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.