Diasporic Identity, Intellectual Nomadism and its African Theorists

A dynamic framework for debating diasporic African identity draws on Ntongela Masilela’s work on the New African Movement. Linking the global to the local, the argument connects theorists who have applied similar dialectical arguments in other expressive sites as they try to make sense of their own cultural origins and subsequent diasporic nomadism. Drawing on the nomadic ideas of Teshome Gabriel, other travelling scholars engaged in pluriversal thinking were invited to respond to a developing analysis to help shape this article’s outcome. The question facing such academic travellers is where do their bodies belong? And, how do these disparate bodies interact across spaces, races, continents and identities? Successful identities in the modern world are argued to be hybrid, fluid and diasporic, deriving from the original Kalahari San. Nomadism is the unifying metaphor in explaining cultural hybridity and identity construction.