The varying meanings of blackness in Brazil are addressed in Elaine Pereira Rocha's Becoming black: Brazil's long search for racial identity, which focuses on the historical construction of racial identity in Brazil, the various ways it appears in language and its definitions in connection with physical and cultural blanqueamiento (whitening) and the more recent 'back to black' movement. Even though, for many years, Afro-Brazilians lacked representation at the public and state levels, a continuing and dynamic process circulating around conceptual debates in militant, academic and government circles culminated in Law 10.639 of 2003, which established the compulsory teaching of the history of Africa and African descendants at all school levels as a tool for educating a new generation against racism and racialism.  
Moving the lens from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean has become possible thanks to new research, including that of Françoise Vergès, who argues that the 'Indian Ocean as a diasporic field' is often overlooked in diasporic studies. The research indicates that '[f]or centuries, Africans, Indians, Chinese, Jews, Malays  
and Arabs have circulated across the Indian Ocean' as 'migrants, traders, merchants, pirates, explorers, missionaries, pilgrims and captives'. This large demographic scope presents a range of diasporic threads and formations, with the Indian Ocean still remaining 'a space of interwoven experiences and multidimensional memories, reconfigured networks of capital and trade, and new nodes of geopolitical conflict'. Using the language of Global Africa, Verges addresses the need for new work that rewrites 'the magnitude of diasporic movements in the Indian Ocean', thus building, as Gilroy did with the United States and Britain, a similar counternarrative of modernity, but this time in relation to African-Asian connections. 'The history of Global Africa, past and present', she asserts, 'will be written by tracing the multiple and complex itineraries and routes taken by Africans across water towards islands and continents'.