The globalAfrican diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas.[47] The African populations in the Americas are descended from haplogroup Lgenetic groups of native Africans.[48][49] The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the native West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil, the United States, and Haiti (in that order).[50][51] However, the term can also be used to refer to African descendants who immigrated to other parts of the world consensually. Some[quantify] scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa.[52] The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century.[53] The term diaspora originates from the Greek διασπορά (diaspora, "scattering") which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations.[54]
Less commonly, the term has been used in scholarship to refer to more recent emigration from Africa.[55] The African Union (AU) defines the African diaspora as consisting: "of people of native or partial African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union".[56] Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union".[57]
^"Censusstatistieken 2012"(PDF). Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek in Suriname (General Statistics Bureau of Suriname). p. 76. Archived from the original(PDF) on March 5, 2016. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
^In an article published in 1991, William Safran set out six rules to distinguish "diasporas" from general migrant communities. While Safran's definitions were influenced by the idea of the Jewish diaspora, he recognised the expanding use of the term. Rogers Brubaker (2005) also noted that use of the term "diaspora" had started to take on an increasingly general sense. He suggests that one element of this expansion in use "involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space". An early example of the use of "African diaspora" appears in the title of Sidney Lemelle, Robin D. G. Kelley, Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1994).
^Akyeampong, E. (2000). "Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africans". African Affairs. 99 (395): 183–215. doi:10.1093/afraf/99.395.183.
^"The Diaspora Division". Statement. The Citizens and Diaspora Organizations Directorate (CIDO). Archived from the original on December 1, 2015. Retrieved January 7, 2016.