Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the "Black world" paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression. Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery's afterlife-including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song-shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimaraes's novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage," Kara Walker's sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografia de un esclavo. Kennon's expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.

This volume brings together top researchers, thinkers, and activists from across disciplines to reflect on the study of Africa. Critical Dimensions of African Studies: Re-Membering Africa emphasizes a critique of power structures, the promotion of human liberation, a commitment to social justice and transformation, and critical reflection on the politics of the production and circulation of knowledge of Africa. Editors, Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Tom Spencer-Walter, organize the book around three related key themes: international/transnational, humanistic, and combined critical theory and practice perspectives. They argue that each theme represents an important dimension of contemporary African and African Diaspora Studies and re-centering these themes within the discipline will help to advance the field. The diverse contributors capture the goal and method for re-membering Africa by reflecting and defining the field from various disciplines in order to consider the history, the critical debates, and the challenges to current views of the status and future direction of African Studies.