What happens when disciplines that study diaspora are inclined to perceive knowledge derived from Black life as anachronism? In this book, A. Francis Carter, Jr. centers diaspora as a prism to explore and intervene in hermeneutical theory. How scholars write history and interpret early Christian texts is not neutral; they rehearse cartographies drawn by Enlightenment thinkers who treated linearity as the shape of human progress and the nation-state as its natural container. These inherited cartographies function as unquestioned scriptures that shape how interpreters reconstruct the past and read texts within those historical reconstructions. Through contextual readings, Carter exposes a disciplinary predisposition towards anti-Blackness incipient to Diaspora Studies. He then reorients the discourse and maps diaspora’s etymological origins and biblical uses through a Black Atlantic cartographic framework — replacing sameness with differentness, linearity with polyvocality, and the erasure of Black life with its recognition as a site from which scripture, history, and diaspora become legible.
