Dear Colleagues,

Please see the call below for handbook contributors.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Edited Handbook (In discussion with Palgrave Macmillan)

Transnational Africanisms in Communication

Diasporic Epistemologies and Afrocentric Ways of Knowing Across the Black Diaspora

Editors: Nickesia S. Gordon & Kehbuma Langmia

Afrocentric communication theory gave the discipline a durable vocabulary for African ways of knowing. Molefi Kete Asante's concept of nommo, the generative, world-making force of the spoken word, and Ama Mazama's articulation of the Afrocentric paradigm established that communication could be theorized from an African center rather than measured against a Western monolith. This handbook seeks to build directly on that foundation.

As such, our aim is to extend the Afrocentric project outward, that is, to follow African epistemologies as they travelled into Lusophone (Portuguese), Hispanophone, and Francophone worlds and into the often-overlooked African diaspora of the Indian Ocean. We take up Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, particularly its account of the Black experience as a circulatory, transoceanic formation shaped by slavery, migration, and diasporic exchange, and bring it into dialogue with communication theory. We also extend the de-Westernizing communication movement, which has already done much to decenter Eurocentric frames, into new terrain, namely, the diasporic African epistemologies at work across the Black Americas, the Caribbean, Black Europe, and Afro-Asia.

This handbook, then, is conceived as a continuation and a convening that represents bringing Afrocentric theory, Black transnational thought, and the de-Westernizing movement into conversation with one another. It theorizes African ways of knowing through the lens of communication as rhetoric, media and mediation, performance, and intercultural and interpersonal relation, tracked transnationally across the diaspora, and voiced by scholars writing from those sites

Conceptual throughline: Africanisms in motion

The term Africanisms carries a contested lineage, traced to Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) and its framing of African cultural survival across the Middle Passage. This volume reframes Africanisms not as relics or residue of an origin, but as living grammars that travelled and transformed, becoming generative precisely because they changed as they moved. This is the spirit of Édouard Glissant's poetics of creolization and Lélia Gonzalez's amefricanidade, concepts that treat Africanisms as epistemologies in motion rather that as frozen remnants of survival.

•      Found a subfield: transnational, diasporic Afrocentric communication studies which would be the first multi-sited articulation of the field, offering a framing that scholars can cite and build on.

•      Decenter existing frames: extending the US-and-continental frame of Afrocentric communication and the Atlantic-bound frame of Black transnationalism toward the Caribbean, South America, Black Europe, and Afro-Asia.

•      Recover overlooked scholars: increasing the visibility of diasporic scholars rarely represented in communication studies, including work from Portuguese-, Spanish-, and French-speaking traditions.

•      Anchor across subfields: bringing diasporic African epistemologies into rhetorical studies, media studies, performance studies, and intercultural/international communication.

We invite proposals across five thematic streams. These are illustrative and not exhaustive as we welcome chapters that push the boundaries of each stream or that bridge more than one.

I. Rhetoric Across the Diaspora

•      Diasporic rhetorical traditions: nommo, signifying, oratory, and call-and-response

•      The griot as rhetor: praise, genealogy, memory, and authority in diasporic publics

•      "Nation language" (Kamau Brathwaite) as rhetorical practice across diasporic tongues

II. Media, Sound, and the Diasporic Public

•      Black, community, and alternative media; radio and sound studies

•      Religion and media; the constitution of diasporic publics

•      The "digital griot;" orality and authority remediated on contemporary platforms

III. Performance and Embodied Communication

•      Ritual, drum, and dance as performance and as message-systems

•      Candomblé, Vodou, Santería/Lukumí, Orisha traditions, and Rastafari livity as epistemic and communicative practice

IV. Relational and Intercultural Ethics

•      Ubuntu and kindred relational philosophies as theories of communication and community

•      Amefricanidade and other frameworks theorized from an African center

V. Communication and Resistance

•      Marronage, the quilombo, and counterpublics

•      Communicative practices of refusal, secrecy, and survival

This is a global call. We are especially keen to hear from scholars working from and on:

•      South America - especially Brazil (Black, quilombola, and Candomblé media and comunicação) and Afro-Colombian and Afro-Ecuadorian Pacific-coast traditions.

•      The Caribbean - Vodou and Rastafari semiotics, creolization, and nation language.

•      Black Europe - Lusophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Black European media and epistemologies.

•      Afro-Asia - the Siddi/Sheedi communities of South Asia and the Indian Ocean African diaspora, an area almost wholly absent from communication scholarship.

•     North America - Gullah Geechee language and storytelling, African American oral traditions, First Nations and Indigenous Black communicative experiences, including but not limited to media representations.

We particularly welcome proposals from early-career scholars, scholars writing outside the Anglophone academy, and scholars based on the continent and across the diaspora whose work has not traditionally circulated in communication studies venues.

Please submit a chapter proposal that includes:

•      A working title for your proposed chapter.

•      A 500-word abstract outlining your chapter's argument, its theoretical and/or empirical grounding, its regional/diasporic site, and its contribution to one (or more) of the five thematic streams above.

•      5–6 keywords identifying the chapter's core themes and geographic/cultural focus.

Proposals should be submitted as a single PDF or Word document.

Please send your proposal (working title, 500-word abstract, and keywords) as a single PDF or Word document to nsggpt@rit.edu by 1 November 2026. Please use the subject line "Transnational Africanisms Chapter Proposal." Informal enquiries and expressions of interest are welcome ahead of the deadline.

We sincerely encourage colleagues to circulate this call within their networks, particularly to scholars working outside the Anglophone communication studies mainstream.

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Nickesia Gordon
Assoc. Professor
Rochester
United States
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