Change and possibility flourish at intersections and borderlands — but so do tensions, and deep questions about belonging and identity.
The children of post-colonial African and Caribbean immigrants constitute a “Third Culture,” one with the potential to redefine what it means to be Black. This Third Culture was the focus of the Binghamton University Department of Africana Studies’ third annual conference, dubbed “The New African Diaspora: Intersections of Culture, Race and Identity.”
Held in October, the two-day event was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Binghamton University President’s Office and included a trio of keynote speakers: Binghamton University Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies Nkiru Nzegwu; critically acclaimed fantasy and sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor; and President of SUNY Oswego Peter Nwosu.
The conference began with Kpanlogo, a traditional Ghanaian dance, coordinated by Assistant Professor of Theater and Africana Studies Samuel Elikem Nyuamuame and performed by the beginner African dance class. The event also included multiple panel presentations on subjects ranging from literature to public health.
“This conference on the intersection of culture, race and identity is predicated on the idea that culture is what we carry around with us,” explained Africana Studies Chair and Professor Titilayo Okoror, also the founding director of the University’s Global Public Health program. “Race is what is ascribed to us when we leave the motherland. Identity is what we ourselves choose to forge, depending on the place and space where we find ourselves.”
Transforming cultures
The term Third Culture was originally coined by researchers John and Ruth Useem in the 1950s to describe the children of American expatriates, military diplomats and others who live and work abroad. These children form a group distinct from their parents’ culture and the culture that surrounds them, explained Nzegwu, a philosopher, painter, author and art historian who founded the Africa Knowledge Project.
At the conference, Third Culture was used to describe the children of African and Caribbean immigrants to the West, who emigrated with their families when they were young. These individuals grew up negotiating between different cultural experiences and bringing African value systems into their understanding of what it means to be Black.
Sometimes, tensions between the African descendants of slaves and those with more recent connections to the continent rise to the fore, with fears of cultural displacement, Nzegwu explained.
Older African American communities may subscribe to Pan-Africanism, in which African identity is seen as one regardless of historical changes and nuances. But even this is subject to technology-driven change; with genetic testing, the descendants of African slaves can now answer longstanding questions about where their ancestors came from on the continent.
“It may not give them the precise ethnic group to which they belong, but it gives them zones within the current-day nationalities, which gives them an idea of those ethnicities,” Nzegwu said.
On the other side of the equation are the various peoples of Africa, who have become sensitive to the needs and yearnings of the African diaspora and now include them as the African Union’s sixth region. African Americans have also been acquiring citizenship in African countries, such as the U.S. singer Ciara, who became a citizen of Benin this summer.
Third Culture individuals are establishing themselves professionally, in the academic, legal, medical and public health fields. They have also played an important role in the massive popularity of Afrobeats, a term used to describe popular music from West Africa and its diaspora, and the rise of African cinema. Known as Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry is the second largest in the world, after India’s Bollywood; Hollywood is a distant third, Nzegwu said.
As digital natives, today’s African diaspora is defined by a lifestyle of connectivity and content creation, living intensely in a world of computers, smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence. The influence of technology offers both global opportunities and global dangers.
For example, the online gaming platform Roblox has invented a game that invites participants to manage their own country, including economic management, budgeting, resource development — and military conquest. Developed online, these skills are being used by young people to topple governments in places like Kenya, Cameroon and Mauritius, Nzegwu said.
This dynamic isn’t just limited to Africa. Rooted in Silicon Valley, ideologies known as TESCREAL — for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalists, Effective Altruism and Longtermism — are advancing a rightwing agenda with authoritarian tendencies, connected with eugenics and scientific racism. These philosophies underlie data-mining companies with black-box algorithms, Nzegwu said. Proponents include such figures as Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, among others.
Under TESCREAL, eliminating three-quarters of the world’s population is not considered a moral problem, as long as a select few can progress, she warned.
“There’s the potential for political weaponization and the transfer of sensitive personal data. Welcome to the brave new world for the Third Culture,” Nzegwu said. “Good that they are savvy in the digital space, because the new frontier of war is going to be digital.”
Africa and sci-fi
The work of acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy author Nnedi Okorafor is a prime example of Third Culture creativity. A professor at Arizona State University, Okorafor is the daughter of Nigerian Igbo parents. In the 1980s, she and her siblings faced open racism in the south Chicago neighborhood where they grew up, where they were among the first Black families. Family trips to Nigeria helped them find their footing, but Okorafor and her siblings were considered different there, too, as Americans unable to speak the Igbo language.
Since 2005, Okorafor has written more than 20 novels, novellas, short stories, comics and screenplays; each was an act of exploration, she said. They include the novels Who Fears Death, Binti, Lagoon and, most recently, Death of the Author,which blend African spirituality and advanced technology. Who Fears Death is currently under development by HBO, and Okorafor has also worked on Marvel’s Black Panther, Shuri and LaGuardia series, among others.
“I write predominantly speculative fiction, what most people would call science fiction and fantasy. But over time, I realized that those categories didn’t quite hold the spirit of what I was doing, so I made my own,” Okorafor said.
She formulated the labels africanfuturism and africanjujuism, subsets of science fiction and fantasy, respectively, that are rooted in African culture, spiritualities and cosmologies. In some senses, the two are opposites: Africanjujuism reaches backward and inward, connecting with spirits, intuition, the unseen and unknown, while africanfuturism reaches forward and outward, in the manner of technology-driven sci-fi.
Her early family trips to Nigeria sparked her initial stories, which were magical realist tales; her foray into science fiction began with the arrival of cell phones and the Internet in the 1990s.
“I was seeing them in the village. Cyber cafes were filled with scammers, students and dreamers,” she reflected. “I began to wonder: What would the future look like in this village that had such vibrant cultural history and energy, yet lacked running water and electricity, a place that now had portable, chargeable supercomputers that connected to the rest of the world in seconds?”
Her most recent novel, Death of the Author, was published in January 2025. She began work on the novel days after the unexpected death of her sister Ngozi in 2021.
“From the start, my sisters and I talked about me writing our story about human cultural experience. We were Nigerian Americans who were deeply connected to Nigeria. We loved it fiercely, but we didn’t romanticize it or demonize it,” she said. “We saw it clearly. We saw its beauty, its chaos, its contradictions, and we loved it still.”
Grief gave Okorafor permission to finally write about her family’s experience, albeit through the lens of speculative fiction.
The protagonist, a failed college professor named Zelu, has written a book called Rusted Robots set in a postapocalyptic Earth, where the last human is living in the Nigerian city of Lagos. The book braids Zelu’s personal story and the sci-fi tale she pens, taking it in unexpected directions.
“Writing this book helped me remember who I was. Death of the Author is many things, but above all, it is my experience,” Okorafor said. “In Death of the Author, I translated the diasporic experience — this long, complex story of migration, pride, identity, language lost and found — into data, robots, AI, machines and automation.”