"In a critical, well-researched, and illuminating analysis of history and literature, this study highlights the dynamics of the relationship between Africans and African-Americans since the original separation of the Middle Passage. The study emerges at a timely phase, as America struggles with its racial heritage, its ethnic future, and multiculturalism, and as people of African descent create new contexts for defining identity in a nation that struggles to embrace Africans who have arrived, this time, as voluntary migrants."--Jacket.