This issue set out to explore diaspora feminist engagements with the idea and reality of Africa: the gendered experiences of diaspora populations and the influence of the diaspora on gender relations and feminist engagements within Africa. With the following articles: 'The relevance of black feminist scholarship: a Caribbean perspective' by Violet Eudine Barriteau : 'A feminist review of the idea of Africa in Caribbean family studies' by Theresa Ann Rajack-Talley : 'Racial and gender inequality in Latin America: Afro-descendent women respond' by Helen I. Safa : 'Con-di-fi-cation': Black women, leadership and political power' by Carole Boyce Davies : 'The trek for a sense of belonging' by Annecka Leolyn Marshall : 'Fashioning women for a brave new world: gender, ethnicity and literary representation' by Paula Morgan : 'A tribute to Coretta Scott King: 1927–2006' by Simidele Dosekun : and 'A triangular trade in gender and visuality: the making of a cross-cultural image-base' by Patricia Mohammed.
Author explores the role of dance in Katherine Dunham's ethnography of the Caribbean, Island Possessed, focusing on the fieldwork she conducted in Haiti. Author questions Dunham's use of dance as both a source and mode of embodied knowledge in fieldwork, a way of sharing time and exchanging information within the communities she studied. Author also investigates the role of the (black, female) ethnographer's body as a locus of possible continuities/discontinuities between American and African identities, and a place of intersection for power relations between the United States and the Caribbean.