The chapters in this volume cover three main themes: (1) the various African diasporas, ancient and modern, their numerous contributions to the construction of modern societies, and their struggles for emancipation, independence and improvement; (2) the local dimensions of race/blackness, including racism and black identity movements; and (3) trajectories of individuals who survived the slave trade and slavery and became visible in the history of Global Africa.  
We try to answer the associated questions on both a temporal and a spatial level. On a temporal level, the essays cover the transit of Africans within the continent and to the various regions of the Middle East, the Americas, Europe, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean region, China and Australia from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern period. They examine the mutual bonds between Africans and Afrodescendants on different continents as connected by trade, diplomacy, maritime crossings, slavery, emancipation and post-emancipation, colonialism and post-colonialism, internal migrations and the return of freed Africans and their children to the continent.  
Although the majority of the African diaspora members were victims of the slave trade, it is essential to keep in mind that not all enslaved people were African. Therefore, slave communities, say in the Americas, should not be considered synonymous with African diasporic communities (Jayasuriya, 2008). In Goa, for example, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, manumission letters show that among the enslaved there were Indian and Chinese people. However, the majority of the manumitted wore 'Gatual', 'Curumbim' and 'Balagate' garb, which suggests that they were from India itself (Faria, 2020, p. 11). Even in Brazil, the term 'slave' was not synonymous with African, since the Indigenous populations, called 'negros da terra' (blacks of the land), were largely enslaved during the colonial period.