Today's study of the African diaspora offers a promise for conceptualization and research in transdisciplinary analysis that parallels the founding contributions of African Studies within area-studies scholarship half a century ago. Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, the two principal scholars of the African Diaspora Research Circle at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, undertook a review of the diaspora framework with a March 2006 conference. The resulting conference volume centres on the ‘intersections of African Diaspora Studies and the disciplines’ – that is, discussions of method and framework rather than a report on empirical findings. The sixteen chapters provide an uneven yet provocative and informative tour through the developing intellectual enterprise of analyzing the African diaspora. Olaniyan and Sweet posed five problems to each of the chapter authors: the place of an African diaspora subfield within each disciplinary field; the methods of each subfield; conflicting approaches within each subfield; the impact of the subfield on its home discipline; and connections of the subfield to other disciplines. The strongest chapters offer responses to all of these questions; the weaker chapters give partial responses.

Four excellent and ambitious chapters address the full range of this agenda, demonstrating how a broad African diaspora discourse has expanded within the fields of history, archaeology, theatre, and geography. For history, Kim Butler recounts how the formal framework of African diaspora arose in the 1960s and has continued to grow steadily; she recalls the broad historical study of African-descended peoples from the nineteenth century and identifies recent and synthetic interpretations of the African diaspora. For archaeology, Theresa Singleton emphasizes the patient yet determined approach of archaeologists, including the innovative work of recent-era digs for Africa and the diaspora. Sandra Richards, in the one strong presentation on the arts, moves adeptly through the overlapping disciplines of theatre (limited to the texts of dramatic works) and performance studies (incorporating performances and audience participation), showing how ingenious studies of works from Africa and the North American diaspora have strengthened both disciplines. Judith Carney assembles an impressive list of contributions in the field of geography to diaspora connections, though focusing mainly on the Americas.

For six other disciplines, authors were more selective in their spatial and topical reach. On political science, Robert Fatton Jr. identifies important studies by Africanist scholars but argues that they are neglected by leaders in the discipline as a whole; the field includes little work at the pan-diaspora level. Fatimah Jackson and Latifa Borgelin provide an important report on findings within genetics of importance for the past and present of the African diaspora; on the other hand they give little direct comment on the diaspora framework. Richard Price addresses anthropology through concentration on the Caribbean and the thesis of creolization, defending it against critiques that he calls ‘Africentric’. For English Caribbean sociology, Paget Henry makes clear the pervasive problem of disciplines dominated by North American scholarship: from the 1980s, rational choice and the neoliberal swept sociology in North America but not elsewhere. In other chapters, authors adopt individual and regional perspectives on issues influenced by African diaspora studies but fall short of clarifying the intersection of the African diaspora and that discipline. Disciplines that could not be represented in the volume included literature, linguistics, religious studies, and economics.

Based on this volume one may argue that the African diaspora framework seems to have gained recognition within the parent discipline for history, archaeology, theatre, geography, genetics, and perhaps ethnomusicology. Anthropology appears to remain mostly in an area-studies framework. Disciplinary recognition of the African diaspora as a social framework is weakest within the social sciences, while such recognition is slightly stronger for arts and humanities. Despite this unevenness, the African diaspora appears to be advancing as a framework and not just as a label.

The editors, in their introduction, offer several prescriptive statements. They argue that scholars of the African diaspora should anchor themselves in their respective disciplinary canons and then branch out from this foundation. Yet a problem arises when the disciplinary canons are not appropriate, as when sociology adopted neoliberalism and rational-choice models as their standard, abandoning the concerns of African diaspora scholars. Then the editors stress that the African continent must be the intellectual starting point of African diaspora studies. Yet half of the chapter authors portray a diaspora that is not closely tied to Africa – so I wish the editors had discussed this discrepancy. Further, the editors argue that scholars must be open to ‘nondiscursive expressions’ (not just texts) as sources on the African diaspora. While this point seems central, these ‘nondiscursive expressions’ would be mediated through disciplines that are not the strongest areas in African diaspora studies, as seen in this book. In addition, the editors argue that the African diaspora must be studied with emphasis on ‘African diaspora intellectual genealogy’ and with an ‘overlapping, comparative perspective’. By this, I assume they mean that more work must go into locating and drawing upon texts and non-discursive expressions by founding thinkers in all parts of the African diaspora.

The tensions within the ‘intersections’ of this volume come closest to resolution in the accomplished chapter by British-born Jayne Ifekwunigwe, who uses an anthropologist's touch to show how Europe today intertwines the consequences of colonial, postcolonial, and globalized diasporas; she shows how the parallels and links of diaspora within Africa assist in the understanding of Europe. This critical and revealing gem of an essay, marginalized in a section on regional diasporas, works precisely from the margins to convey the most comprehensive picture of the diaspora as a social object of study and an intellectual frame of analysis. It comes closer than any other to answering the question of how diaspora studies advance beyond area studies.

The volume as a whole reflects a courageous effort: it goes beyond empirical specifics of the African diaspora to provide an interim report on intellectual work crossing the boundaries of national units and disciplinary boxes. At this level, the book is deserving of the closest scrutiny by those seeking to influence the directions of humanistic scholarship. Regardless of whether the disciplinary centers adopt this expanded framework, what keeps diaspora scholarship moving ahead is partly the inherent interest of work at that scale and especially the global social consciousness of black people, most notably the communities and scholars of the ‘new African diaspora’, now found all over the world.