In recent decades, studies of the African diaspora have shown an interest in the role that blacks have played in creating modernity. This trend also runs counter to the traditional Eurocentric perspective that has dominated history books, showing Africans and their diasporas as primitive victims of slavery, devoid of historical power. According to historian Patrick Manning, blacks toiled at the center of the forces that created the modern world. Paul Gilroy describes the suppression of blackness at the expense of imagined and created ideals of nations as “cultural insiderism. Cultural insiderism is used by nations to separate deserving and undeserving groups and requires a “sense of ethnic difference,” as mentioned in his book Black Atlantic. Acknowledging their contributions provides a comprehensive view of world history.

The late cultural and political theorist Richard Eaton proposed to understand diaspora as a “culture of dislocation. According to Eaton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, notions of dispersal and the “cycle of African preservation, redemption, abandonment and restoration. According to Eaton, diaspora analysis is dangerous because it assumes that the diaspora exists outside Africa, thus simultaneously denying and desiring Africa.

Citizenship of the Diaspora.
In chapter eight of her book Rihanna Barbados World GURL in Global Popular Culture, Heather Russell describes diasporic citizenship as an identity where you “simultaneously negotiate civic responsibility, public discourse, nostalgia, statehood, belonging and migration, transnational cultural belonging and shifting / object fluid positioning across material and symbolic borders. Musical artists are the main figures to be evaluated with this theory, as they demand to bring them public discourse and their music to bring cultural belonging. Thus, for musicians who have achieved this level of transnational fame and musical production, they must balance their relationship to their identity and their home with the transnational population with which they interact through their music, performance, and public image.

Robyn Rihanna Fenty is a global superstar whose music transcends national boundaries and, as such, is an ideal case for diaspora citizens. She is one of the few black women to achieve this level of global success and gain diaspora citizenship, which forces her to balance her identity with her relationship to her diverse audience.