"Black folk here and there": Repositioning other(ed) African diaspora(s) in/and "Europexs"

The story I will begin to recount is one that seeks to expand the way we think about African diaspora(s) in/and "Europe." Using broad brushstrokes, I will explore two compound problematics that stand in as distillations rather than crystallizations of relevant debates. First, why is it difficult to confine or define the African Diaspora in/and Europe, and what impact has the pioneering work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy had on the emergence of a dominant Anglophone Black [North] Atlanticist approach to African Diaspora Studies in Europe?1 Second, how might a reconceptualization of "new" transnational/extracolonial African diasporas offer a framework that unsettles the conceptual "tidiness"-as discursive formations-of "Europe," "Africa," and the "African Diaspora"?2 Finally, I will close with some polemical thoughts about potential impediments to proper diasporic dialogue "here and there." 3. © 2010 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved

Recasting 'Black Venus' in the new African Diaspora

This article explores the ways in which transnational feminist analysis can be deployed to reconfigure new gendered and racialized cartographies of the African Diaspora in Europe. First, I position contemporary film representations of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy in dialogical relation to 19th century discourses of black sexuality - in particular, Sharpley-Whiting's (1999) reinscribed 'Black Venus Master Narrative' - and assess historical and geographical (dis)continuities in their modes of signification. Second, by linking endemic factors feeding the supply of Nigerian women for the purposes of (in)voluntary participation in the Italian sex industry, such as the localized feminization of poverty and regionally specific perceptions of sex work as a temporary economic strategy, I engage with broader feminist debates on victimization and agency in global sex work and migration literatures. In doing so, this dialectical think piece highlights the gendered complexities of new African diasporic formations and the ways in which their growth is facilitated by broader illegal networks that shape and are shaped by vicissitudes in glocalized economies. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved