The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003),
The Practice of Diaspora is nothing short of a masterpiece. By looking at the way black life, thought, struggles and quite literally, words, are translated across the black Francophone and Anglophone worlds, Edwards reveals how Paris became a locus for the development of black modernism and internationalism during the crucial interwar years. Rather than search for some essential unity, he explores difference, creative tensions, misapprehensions and misunderstandings between key black intellectuals. The result is a spectacular interdisciplinary study that will profoundly change the way we think about the African diaspora.–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
—just an ache that grew
until she knew she’d already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.
I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove
