Gloria Chuku's edited volume brings together compelling and original research from scholars across the globe. The essays included interrogate nationhood, ethnicity, and cross-cultural representation as they impact identity formation and modes of affiliation in Africa and its diaspora. Topics span five continents and range from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. While some chapters directly examine how intersecting relationships between Africans and members of the diaspora engender new, vibrant processes of cultural and social development, the anthology as a whole seems to be more concerned with examining issues of nationhood and the effects of globalization at local levels across Africa and the diaspora. It is not the book's aim to situate diaspora and nation as competing frameworks for affiliation. Instead it tends to present Africa and the diaspora as parallel terms.

The first of the anthology's four sections focuses on the socio-cultural development of African and diasporic communities, paying close attention to how the global flow of people, ideas, and capital influenced local modernization. It is here that the anthology most closely explores the transnational relations between Africa and its diaspora. Richard Enoh, for example, looks at the links between Caribbean creolization and the development of modern cosmopolitan cities in West Africa by analyzing the repatriation of diasporan Africans to Victoria in nineteenth-century colonial Cameroon. Meanwhile, Gloria Chuku, in her chapter on Nwafor Orizu, shows how Nigerians educated abroad attempted to promote democratic tenets of American education in Nigeria, such as the development of the individual and the right to free access to knowledge, as a nationalist imperative against the British colonial government. Chuku has an exceptionally keen awareness of the United States’ Cold War political objective to foster democracy in Africa. She highlights Orizu and other Nigerians’ influences over transforming the image of Africa in the US, thus presenting African and diasporic relations as multidirectional.

Section Two explores performative elements of African and diasporic cultures including religious ritual, dance, music, and costume. It also considers ways that performance is fundamental to local and transnational expressions of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In her chapter on Afro-Brazilian dancers’ appropriation of Caribbean Roots Reggae, Gee Yawson examines how local black communities elevate African diaspora culture as a form of uplift against marginalization within larger multiracial nations. Her analysis, however, centers on ways an emphasis on racial affiliation can overshadow the hetero-patriarchal gender norms ingrained in African diaspora cultures. She argues that Afro-Brazilian agarrado dancing to Roots Reggae both perpetuates and subverts oppressive gender norms. In their respective chapters, Mobolanle Sotunsa and Bojor Enamhe display ways in which local Nigerian performance takes account of the social, cultural, and economic benefits of having a global reach. Sotunsa considers the female performer Ayanbinrin's amalgamation of English language drum poetry with Yoruba talking drums as displaying a modern international dimension. She also correlates the modernizing of dominantly male Yoruba drum culture with femininity. In her discussion of Masquerade as social art, Enamhe emphasizes the importance of costume aesthetics in attracting tourists to fuel local and national economies.

Continuing the anthology's attention to the transnational flow of people and ideas, Sections Three and Four focus on postcolonial nation-building and national belonging in an era of globalization. While Section Three offers readings of written texts, media, and literary, Section Four engages the politics of ethnic and national belonging and considerations of future national developments. Busuyi Mekusi and Bola Dauda in chapters on, respectively, South Africa and Nigeria, discuss the obstacles of nation-building among people divided by religious, ethnic, and racial attachments, divides often caused by colonial interference. Both scholars prioritize patriotism over other modes of affiliation. They also understand, however, the concept of national belonging in a global era as expanding beyond specific geographies and each author furthermore advocates for the participation of Africans living in exile in the nation-building process. Alternatively, Eunice Omonzejie, in her analysis of francophone literature, discusses the impacts of migration on African masculinities as engendering psychological and cultural instability. She reads this instability as a sign of non-belonging to national communities at home or in exile. Section Four ends with two chapters spotlighting the imperative that, in order for it to be a model African nation, Nigeria must contend with its own domestic issues, including internal discrimination.

Without de-emphasizing the rich analysis and original scholarship in this anthology, the reader would like to have seen a deeper interrogation of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘modernity’. For instance, several of the chapters link modernity with Western influence. It would have been useful to bring in recent debates from the field of African diaspora studies, which examine Africa's role in black Atlantic modernity. Employing a diaspora paradigm, meanwhile, would have been a productive way to interrogate the nation. That said, this book offers an exciting alternative perspective on the relations between Africa and its diaspora.