This article examines the construction and use of a diasporan framework for analyzing Afro-Atlantic history during the postabolition era. It summarizes the findings of the author's research on the first fifty years after the end of slavery in Brazil (1888–1938). The use of a diasporan framework illuminates patterns, otherwise obscured by traditional monographic approaches, that can be compared with other Afro-Atlantic communities.

In 1920s South Africa, white segregationists justified accelerated racially discriminatory legislation by casting blacks as “uncivilized primitive natives” undeserving of full citizenship rights. Africans often countered this discourse by pointing to African Americans as proof of black capacities to modernize and as role models worthy of emulating in antisegregationist activity. Black South African leaders often associated themselves with African Americans to further legitimize their respective political activities. This article explores this phenomenon with the example of James Thaele, the American-educated president of the African National Congress (Cape Western Province), perhaps the most actively militant organization in the late 1920s. Previous scholars have viewed Thaele's flamboyant dress and hyperbolic language as evidence of a curious eccentric. Instead, we show that Thaele's dress and language were important performative tools that subverted, mocked, and reversed white modernity narratives that locked Africans into static “uncivilized native” categories. Black America was an indispensable aspect of Thaele's antisegregationist attacks. At historically black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), he earned two degrees, attaining an educational level then unavailable in South Africa, and he became enamored of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (U.N.I.A.). Upon his return to South Africa, Thaele legitimized his political organizing, public speeches, and writings by emphasizing his celebrated American background and pointing to the U.N.I.A. as a model for antisegregationist organizing in South Africa.

The Abakuá Society for men is derived from the West African Ékpè Societies of the Cross River region. It was founded in Havana, Cuba, in 1836 to resist slavery, and has since been active in many aspects of Cuban culture. Although hermetic and little known even within Cuba, an analysis of Cuban popular music recorded from the 1920s until the present reveals Abakuá influence in nearly every genre of Cuban popular music. Abakuá lore is orally transmitted, and Cuban musicians who are Abakuá members have continually documented key aspects of their society's history in commercial recordings, often in Abakuá language. Because theirs is a secret language for initiates only, Abakuá have commercially recorded actual chants of the society, knowing that outsiders cannot interpret them. Even so, these recordings have been very popular because the Abakuá represent a rebellious, even anticolonial, aspect of Cuban culture. Now played throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, Cuban popular music and its derivatives maintain Abakuá language and aesthetics as integral elements. Because so little has been written about the society by members themselves, commercial recordings with Abakuá content are an important source of knowledge about this group. While listening to the lyrics, I realized that Abakuá musicians have sung about their contributions to Cuban history, their liberation struggles, and race relations. My research suggests the rising importance of Abakuá as a symbol of Cuban culture.

A group of African American and Dalit scholars are at work on a project on the similarities in the histories and lives of African and Dalit peoples. Scholars such as Ivan van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, V. T. Rajshekar, and others form this submerged network of Afro-Dalit literature. The Afro-Dalit project seeks to posit a common origin for Africans and Dalits as a means to call for political solidarity in the present. “Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!” explores the framework of Afro-Dalit scholarship, critiques it, and then offers an alternative approach to the interconnections in African and Indian life. Rather than endorsing epidermal determinism, this article calls for a polycultural approach to the cosmopolitanism of our lives.