Joseph Harris, who provided one of the first mappings of the African diaspora, insisted that, among other things, the African diaspora has to be studied in its global dimensions. His essay "Africa and its diaspora since 1935" in the General History of Africa, Vol. VIII (Mazrui, ed. 1993), and his Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1982), the product of a Howard University conference on the subject, are some of his contributions to the field of African diaspora studies. ${ }^{6}$ In this regard, contemporary scholars, such as Michael A. Gomez, who edited the first conference papers of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), as well as Diasporic Africa: A Reader (2006), and has also authored a number of works, including Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (2004), have contributed towards a massive body of work covering a range of fields, geographies and disciplines, some of which are represented here. While initially, anthropologists did much of the documentation of the cultural existence of African diaspora communities, historians such as Gomez have been central to delineating the nature of these movements and their local and global histories. Fields such as political science and economics have not been as substantially represented in this largely interdisciplinary project but are represented in this volume.  
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