".there is no way to pay back our historical debt to Africa." (President Luis Inácio 'Lula' da Silva - President of Brazil)
Long before it was fashionable, the publication of C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938) established in the Americas the conceptual approach that would guide the embryonic research interest in the African Diaspora evident from the first half of the 20th century.
James's seminal work moved the enslaved Africans who built much of the Atlantic world to the center of his narrative in the context of the circum-Atlantic as a space of historical and cultural productions that illuminates the mutual transformation of the diverse transnational, trans-imperial and transoceanic populations of the African Diaspora that Thompson (1983) and Gilroy (1993) referred to as the "Black Atlantic".
In his work, Gilroy employed the term "Black Atlantic" to describe the social, cultural and political space that emerged out of the experience of slavery, exile, oppression, exploitation, and struggle.
We invite scholars to rethink a new theoretical and historical cartography beyond Gilroy's limited framework of the Black Atlantic anchored in the Anglophone Atlantic or the American branch of the African Diaspora.