# Race, location and global blackness  
The layered meanings of race as expressed by the applications of blackness have a variety of locational permutations. The current volume of the General History of Africa on the diaspora has addressed these permutations in detail, offering recent research and thinking on the economies of blackness on individual subjects, bodies, and nations. Minkah Makalani, in his introduction to 'Diaspora and the localities of race' (2009), offers an important frame for discussions on 'how to think about the local in understanding race in the African diaspora' (pp. 3-4). He indicates how the essays in his project 'turn to the places inhabited by race, where the local occurs, to draw attention to the divergent racializations that constitute the African diaspora [...] The difference that race makes in diaspora is precisely through its instantiation of difference; place and local structures become the nodes of diaspora, an ongoing construction and elaboration carried out at the same time within and against the nation' (p. 4).  
The essays in this section thus offer ways of concretely addressing the localities of blackness from different lived realities. In Blackness beyond the United States: understanding new diasporic definitions, Michelle M. Wright begins her