The Enslavement of Africans and The Origins of the African Diaspora in the Americas
The history of the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants can serve as a convenient point of origin in tracing the history of the African diaspora in the Americas, but this history does not experientially exhaust the practical politics and social pursuits nor the striving for existential meanings in what, by now, in the postcolonial, postmodern era, is a multinational, transnational, and heterogeneous social formation. Enslaved Africans previously resident in the Iberian Peninsula were probably brought to the Caribbean as early as 1493 on Columbus’s second voyage to the New World. Columbus also brought sugar cane on that voyage, and by 1516 sugar grown on the island of Hispañola was shipped back to Europe. Concomitant with the founding of what would become known as the Sugar Revolution, enslaved Africans were taken directly to the New World, the Caribbean, and Brazil....
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Yelvington, K.A. (2005). African Diaspora in the Americas. In: Ember, M., Ember, C.R., Skoggard, I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_3
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