According to Patterson and Kelley (2000) attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself. Dating back at least to Juan Latino (a 16th century Spanish black professor at Granada), Ottobah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano in the eighteenth century, and Jose Manuel Valdes (a Afro Peruvian physician who proved that cancer was not contagious) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black writers and activists have often defined themselves as part of a larger international black community. The presumption that black people worldwide share a common culture was a response to a political imperative. An imperative that led to the formation of political and cultural movements premised on international solidarity. Thus, while acknowledging that African cultural elements survived the forced dispersal throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, we must always keep in mind that diasporic identities are socially and historically constituted, reconstituted, and reproduced; and that any sense of a collective identity among black peoples wherever they are found throughout the word is contingent and constantly shifting. Neither the fact of blackness nor shared experiences under racism nor the historical process of their dispersal makes for community or even a common identity. Yet it was precisely out of the historical struggle to resist this domination that a concept of "authentic" identity emerged alongside a discourse of difference and discontinuity. Stuart Hall (1990) identifies these two opposing but dialectically linked conceptions of identity in his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." He writes: "The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self,' hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves,' which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect their common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people,' with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history." What we will hear next is a recent talk from Dr. Joseph Harris where he explores the evolution, current state and the challenges of diaspora studies it faces moving forward. Dr. Joseph Harris a retired distinguished professor emeritus of history from Howard University. His seminal Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1982), a collection of essays that grew out of conferences he organized at Howard University in 1979 and at the University of Nairobi in 1981, is widely credited with establishing the field of African Diaspora Studies. He was founder and first president of the West African Research Association in Senegal, and he served as vice president of the International African Studies Association. From 1994 to 2004, he collaborated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s “Slave Route Project.” In January 2008, Harris organized and moderated an important symposium at the National Archives on the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in captive Africans. He has collaborated with L. Douglas Wilder, former governor of Virginia and past mayor of Richmond, to establish a National Slavery Museum in Petersburg, Va. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program!