## Introduction  
In examining the issues of epistemology - the knowledge-production apparatus which informs representation - as it pertains to African peoples globally, we are faced with the reality that in every discipline, and in every location, one is confronted with the assumption of European historical timelines, theoretical formulations, and aesthetic principles as universal. The claim of western European scholarly enterprises to ownership of the universal has created a hierarchy of knowledge in which African peoples' contributions to human advancement remain at the bottom, if present at all, as such contributions are often totally erased from any intellectual consideration. This epistemological forum advances knowledge of African peoples globally and is divided into two key components, explained below.  
Section 1 deals with race, location, diaspora and global blackness as historical and contemporary realities, covering a number of locational standpoints and knowledge fields. Section 2 addresses Global Africanity and the African diaspora and includes genealogies of current debate, fields excluded from prior consideration, concepts for which there is new discussion, and areas in which there is new research.  
Considering institutionalized knowledge-production systems, as these pertain to African peoples, scholar Sylvia Wynter offered a relevant assessment according to which, with the rise of European modernity, there was created, simultaneously, a category of people whose epistemologies were rendered non-existent:  
The internment of the New World peoples would be followed by that of the African lineage groups, homogenized under the commercial trade name of "negro". ... Soon the shift would be made to the humanist concept of Natural Causality ... in which the African mode of cultural reason was seen as a non-reason; and his internment in the plantation system as slave labor, was being carried out for the purpose of rationalizing him/her as an inferior mode of being in need of rational human baptism (Wynter, 1984, p. 35).