The African diaspora became a way to critique absolutism while keeping the idea of ethnicity intact - what Paul Gilroy (1993) called 'anti-antiessentialism'. Instead of the retention of essential elements from an African past, emphasis was placed on cultures being made and remade, with black identity being constructed from multiple and different sites. Further, instead of being fixed or rooted, African diasporic identity came to be understood as the means by which people of African descent could navigate how they were positioned by and in narratives of the past, and engage in cultural retrieval and reconstruction. The African diaspora became represented as a dialogical site of contestation, negotiation, and refashioning. As such, connections within the diaspora became just as important as ideas of origin, which required the decentring of Africa as homeland. Concepts like 'decalage', 'articulation', 'bricolage', 'the changing same', and 'translation' were used to account for the disunity, misrecognition, differences, and disparities within the African diaspora. These, along with the common experiences of black people, accounted for a more complete picture of how diaspora was lived. Moreover, in an attempt to redress the hegemonic influence which the United States of America and the English-speaking world exerted on African diaspora scholarship, more attention began to be paid to sites within the diaspora that had been marginalized or had received little study.