In and Out of Africa

New areas of intellectual endeavours including postcolonial, transatlantic, global, and cultural studies have facilitated conversations that cut across traditional academic boundaries. Indeed, aside from precipitating more stimulating intellectual dialogues, the advent of multi-disciplinarity has also enabled literary and cultural theorists, critics, students, and teachers to connect and to integrate diverse academic disciplines and schools of thought in the pursuit of a common task. Of the many areas that have benefited from this trend, it is perhaps in the realm of Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latin American studies that one notices a vibrant conversation that deals with the deep historical, social, economic, and political bonds that have connected and still connect Africa to the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian worlds. As these bonds acquire profound meanings in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars from diverse academic backgrounds find new ways to explore these connections. It is in the spirit of this endeavour that the creative artists, scholars of cultural and literary theory and critics whose works are presented in this anthology, attempt to examine wide-ranging themes from colonization, slavery, imperialism, religion, music, and literature. Most of the essays in this collection address long-standing issues related to identity construction, linguistic legacies, religious and cultural beliefs and practices. Others confront questions of migration and immigration, configurations of female agency, and Hispanic pedagogy in Africa and elsewhere. What makes this volume unique and interesting is not only the idea of exploring, examining, and thinking the old in new ways and the new in old ways but also, advancing the conversation of the relationship between Africa and the Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latin American worlds through different intellectual and artistic prisms.