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[^0]:    2 We were also profoundly shaped and inspired - from the time we were children and young adults - by the prose of writers like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison and others, who are of course masters of affective and performative writing. For many of us therefore, black/queer/diaspora is as much about the writing - that is, not 'writing up' data, reporting or mimicking the prose style of French theory, but rather attempting to convey feeling as supplement or complement to information - as, and articulated with, theory and methodology.  
Here, black identity/identification is understood as hybrid, contingent, relational and no less socially real. That is, 'black' is a useful term for describing the historical, political and affective ties of many individuals to one another, yet we do not attach mystical, transhistorical or essential biological value to this term. The black diaspora is at once about particular locations (actual and imagined), roots/uprooting (principally understood as being from Africa, but equally, in other cases, to and within Africa), and routes along which bodies, ideas and texts travel. By diaspora we mean these conditions of movement and emplacement, and processes of (dis)identification, and also relationality, as Jacqueline Nassy Brown (2005) points out. Afrodescendent groups' (dis) identification as black, Afro-hyphenated, Kréyol, Creole, mixed or other, does not occur in a vacuum, but is conditioned by particularities of place, in relation to discourses and practices within other places. Black diasporic relationality refers to this process. And while actual migration, whether forced, chosen or coerced, continues to be a major factor in making the black world, the diaspora is so deeply constitutive of the fabric of blackness that it is also experienced among individuals who will never leave their own town, but who nevertheless powerfully imagine their own black/queer 'other' identity.