☐ ☐ ☐ ☐

1. dispersal to two or more locations
2. collective mythology of homeland
3. alienation from host land
4. idealization of return to homeland asserts that conceptualization of the diaspora must be able to analyze the reality of multiple identities and phases of diasporization over time.
5. ongoing relationship with homeland20
6. Butler and others argue that the diasporic groups, not living in the homeland, opt to return or to make a permanent place in the diaspora, yet they develop “ethno national consciousness”, which is important to survival as a “cultural unit.”
7. Robin Cohen asserts that this type of consciousness connects diasporic people to the homeland especially when they have been separated from the homeland for many generations. This connection to the homeland can real or imagined. In either case, the connection provides the foundation for diasporan identity to emerge. Butler analyzes the “temporal-historical dimensions” of diasporan identity as she posits when the separation from homeland has spanned more than two generations, becoming multi-generational, the identity is conflated with the individual migration experience and a collective history of dispersal.
8. As a method of analysis, recent scholarship divides the concept of the diaspora into temporal categories. Timothy Gideon Kiogora posits three separate temporal historical dimensions of the African diaspora.
1. Enslavement also known as Historic or Classical
2. Colonization
3. New or Post-colonial21

The Diaspora of Enslavement (Historic or Classical) refers to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), which occurred from the 15th to 19th centuries. By the 1500's, the Portuguese facilitated the change in the African "gold coast" to the "slave coast" as they traded only for guns and humans to serve as labor for their "discoveries" in the Americas. The TAST represents only a quarter of the classical African diaspora. Records indicate that an estimated 20 million people were taken from Africa, 8 million shipped to the islands in the Indian Ocean and 4 million to islands of the Red Seas.

Only 10 million persons survived the middle passage, with almost half of those residing in Brazil and the least number arriving in British North America. The number of enslaved that supplied the markets in Africa are unknown, but estimated as twice as many. Colonization refers to the period immediately before and during the Scramble for Africa, which began in the 1870's culminating with the Berlin West Africa Conference in 1885-86. By 1912, only Liberia and Ethiopia were independent nations.

The New or Post-colonial African diaspora is on-going beginning with the liberation wars in Africa during the 1960's. Kiogora asserts new diasporics and their progeny are essentially global citizens. (Barack Obama's father is representative of this diaspora.) It is important to note that many diasporan theorists include the voluntary

20 See Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse” Diaspora, Vol.10 No.2, Fall 2001.

21 Timothy Gideon Kiogora “Reflections on the Role of the New African Diaspora in the Shaping of the African Renaissance” African Studies Association Annual Meeting, November 14, 2008.

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