# Conclusion: finding the when and where of blackness for inclusive definitions  
In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015), I argue that the increasing diversification of black communities in Africa and throughout the globe makes it all the more important that scholars, politicians and activists develop more accurate and inclusive ways to analyse and represent black identities. West, North and East African immigration to Western Europe, China, the United States of America, Canada and Australia, for example, remains largely ignored in dominant discourses on blackness that imagine blackness as located only in Africa (implying that black Africans who settle outside of Africa cannot be considered denizens, much less citizens) or the United States. At the moment, the specific needs of these communities, their religious beliefs and cultural practices, political aspirations and health needs are either lumped in together with those of 'African Americans' (i.e., blacks in the United States who trace their African ancestry through transatlantic slavery) or those associated with a random stereotype of black Africans.  
So what is there to gain from theorizing blackness as homogenous, with no respect for these crucial differences across Africa and within the black/African diasporas? In her 1988 essay Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, Gayatri Spivak offers the term 'strategic essentialism' to explain why a relatively diverse socioeconomic and/or political minority might represent and analyse itself as homogeneous. Spivak argues that because this group is homogenized by bigoted discourses, there is a shared experience of oppression best combated with an organized, unified response.