Since the publication of William Saffran's seminal essay on Diasporas and their relations with Homelands nearly two decades ago, scholarly interest in the nature and limits of interactions between Diasporas and their putative Homelands has increased tremendously. Amidst all the debates about the Diaspora-Homeland binary, the most contested has been with regards to the question of return to, and engagement with, Homeland by Diasporans. The current project argues that not only has the subject of Diasporan engagement with Homeland been central to much of the African Diasporan literatures from the beginning of the twentieth century, but also that from the second half of the century onwards, forces set in motion by the anti-colonial and civil rights movements in both the spaces of the African Homeland and Diaspora release new energies for mutual knowledge across the Atlantic, with the effect that more dialogic encounters between African Diasporans and continental Africans take place, especially within the space of Homeland, imagined or lived.

These encounters and dialogues, I argue, are centered on the subject of transatlantic kinship, and in keeping with their prevalence, a literary genre that chronicles them and is produced by both continental Africans and Diasporans has also emerged. I also contend that while these encounters and the literary narratives that attempt to represent them are informed by a sense of shared history among both sides, the pressures of hyper-globalization as rendered through increased transnational traffic of capital, human and cultural flows have further accelerated the transatlantic kinship dialogue even as both continental Africans and their Diasporan counterparts proactively attempt to challenge the negative effects of globalization, and take advantage of the opportunities offered by the same. This dissertation suggests a conceptual language that can be used to understand and teach the various strands of Diasporan and Homeland literatures not in isolation but as complementary discursive practices that illuminate each other even as they provide us with a useful template for understanding a very important aspect of the transnational discourses of the contemporary world.