## Introduction  
In an age of mass movements of peoples across nation State boundaries, concepts used to depict social action are likely to be, at best, overlapping and, often, muddled. Such is the case of the concept of the African diaspora. The problem it raises is that of how best to define or understand the formation of identities resulting in communities which transgress the central principles of the most powerful communal identity to have emerged since the sixteenth century. This is the philosophy of nationalism, which demands that people or nation (community) and political authority (the State) become coterminous upon a specifically defined territory. In order to understand new movements of diverse populations across a globalized world, scholars in social studies, the humanities and the arts have sought to build on the long-standing concept of diaspora, but this is often conflated with concepts arising from the growth of transnational communities. In the case of the movements of Africans and the identities and communities they have constructed in different parts of the globe, it is of considerable importance to consider carefully whether these are transnational or diaspora societies. The starting point must therefore be a distinction between transnational and diaspora communities.