Pacific. The idea here is to counter the tendency to see the African diaspora exclusively as an Atlantic phenomenon, a tendency even marked by a Northern Atlantic bias (Gilroy, 1993).  
I wish to emphasize that the Global African diaspora perspective considers voluntary and involuntary migratory currents both inside and outside Africa. It goes beyond traditional views that simply focus on European domination and command over the flow of Africans around the world, without downplaying the role of the Europeans in the multiform exploitation of African peoples at home and abroad through time. We chose to go beyond this colonial narrative to introduce a timeline marked by successive diasporas and different dimensions of Africanness worldwide, bringing African peoples and their descendants to centre stage. Thence the importance of the concept of Global Africa, which also has an interdisciplinary aspect that creates a link between history and African studies, black studies, black Atlantic studies, Africana studies and decolonization approaches.  
The research presented in this book is engaged in an effort to overcome a general, imprecise and racialized image of the African continent and its diasporas, which was often used to support the Hegelian notion that Africans had no history, that they did not belong to civilized societies and that they therefore did not contribute to the development of the societies into which they were forcibly inserted. These new perspectives seek to overcome the limitations of previous studies that concentrated on the demography of trafficking and the history of enslavement, and they move towards understanding the historicity of Africa and of Africans on and outside the continent. The emphasis is then shifted to investigations of the multiple experiences in both Africa and the different diaspora destinations, highlighting social and cultural issues as constitutive elements of African agency in exile.