The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism Book

This is an excellent book! Not only is it interesting to read, but offers a critical engagement with existing theories on the notion of diaspora. By studying the print culture (letters, literature, periodicals) between the African American and French African community, Edwards makes a compelling argument of how diaspora is not a given, but rather, it must be practiced.

Of the notion of diaspora he states: "diaspora points to difference not only internally…but also externally….implies neither that it offers the comfort of abstraction, an easy recourse to origins, not that it provides a foolproof anti-essentialism: instead, it forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference."

It becomes evident that Edwards is responding to the abstract notion of a unified, global pan-African diaspora that was perpetuated, perhaps for political ends, by black leaders and intellectuals over time. Black internationalism, the book suggests, "is less like a sturdy edifice or a definitive program than like the uncertain harmony of a new song."