Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué

Diasporas in Africa

Responding to calls to expand our definition of the African diaspora (e.g., Palmer 1998), this project decenters western locales and perspectives on diaspora, contributing to research that rarely recognizes internal diasporas in Africa. I examine one black diasporic religious community anchored in Africa, tracing the converging paths of Africans and African Americans (1950s-1970s). I reveal new transnational diasporic histories and the racial politics that emerged out of those histories in the mid-twentieth century—for example, notions of blackness/Africanness, racial harmony/equity, and Global South activism. In so doing, I expand current scholarship on the African diaspora in politics, history, and African studies.

Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué is Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with additional affiliations in the Department of History and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. As an interdisciplinary historian of Africa, she draws from history, gender studies, feminist studies, and political science to examine 20th-century African history. She is the author of Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019); the book received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize and the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. In addition, Mougoué currently sits on the editorial boards for Feminist Africa, Journal of Women’s History, and Gender & History.