1. I borrow this definition from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles, 5th ed., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), which itself depends upon Deuteronomy 28:25. The definition goes on to tell us that “diaspora” can refer to “all those Jews who live outside the biblical land of Israel”; or the situation of “any body of people living outside their traditional homeland” (671). An account of how discourses on diaspora have evolved can be found in Michel Bruneau’s Diasporas et espaces transnationaux (Paris: Anthropos, 2004).
2. Paul Gilroy provides a genealogy of the use of the term “diaspora” to designate the forced displacement of Africans in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York and London: Verso, 1993), 205–23. See also Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford UP, 1980) on the appropriation of the Exodus story by African American groups in nineteenth and early twentieth century.
3. See Jean Laude, La Peinture française et l’art nègre (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968);
4. Jean-Claude Blachère, Le Modèle nègre: Aspects littéraires du mythe primitiviste au XXe siècle chez Apollinaire, Cendrars, Tzara (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1981);
5. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985);