Baaquaqua (who went from West Africa to Brazil and then to the United States and England, also making a visit to Haiti), whose autobiographies show the intellectual sophistication of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Both men are discussed in this volume. In the nineteenth century, writers of the African diaspora, including Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States, Anténor Firmin in Haiti, Henry Sylvester Williams in Trinidad, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Luis Gama and Maria Firmina dos Reis in Brazil, were among the many men and women who placed slavery, emancipation and post-emancipation at the centre of their concerns. In the twentieth century, intellectual production on these themes continued throughout the diaspora with key concerns such as pan-Africanism (all over the Americas), the Harlem Renaissance (United States), Negritude (French Caribbean), Negrismo (Cuba), Haitian Indigenism and Teatro Experimental do Negro (Brazil), in addition to decolonization in Africa and the civil rights movements in several places. African diaspora thinking was not born in the academy, but instead emerged from historical, cultural and political processes carried out by members of the African diaspora. Antecedents of this agency are covered by the authors in this volume.