Debates and discussion on global or transnational blackness and genealogies of epistemological readings of these realities have the function of challenging older paradigms, such as those relating to: the necessity, or possibility, of physical or emotional return to Africa minus the historical romantic trappings; the relationships between the African diaspora and the continent; the socioeconomic realities and inequities experienced by black communities; the unaddressed relationships with Indigenous communities; and the historical resonances of the definitions of blackness itself. For Fred Moten (2013), blackness is not wretchedness, damnation, absence or nothingness, but radical rejection of these, along with a parallel capacity to live and desire, away from 'social death' to life and, therefore, a preference for 'black optimism' (p. 742).