Book Review

Crossing Boundaries assembles a selection of papers originally presented at a conference on the "Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora" held at Michigan State University in 1995, itself the product of that university's comparative black history program. The volume is part of the important Blacks in the Diaspora series published by Indiana University Press.	1
The essays in this book, in general, address the intersections of the paradigms of "Atlantic" history and "diaspora" studies, seeking to examine the historical experiences of people of African descent in the transatlantic world of the last five hundred years. Though a few of the pieces seem less substantial than one might expect (one is described by its author as a "talk"), this is a rich volume with a wealth of ideas and research findings in the eighteen essays.	2
The editors group the essays into four parts, but their allocation among the themes "Comparative Diaspora Historiography," "Identity and Culture," "Domination and Resistance," and "Geo-Social History and the Atlantic World" seems somewhat arbitrary to this reviewer. Essentially, the pieces fall into two main categories: first, historiographical and conceptual discussions; and, second, articles presenting original research findings on a particular New World African-descended community at a specific historical juncture.	. . .