The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards.

"[1] Edwards examines works by Alain Locke, René Maran, Claude McKay, and Paulette Nardal among others.

Edwards observes that DuBois first presented his famed argument, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," not in his landmark 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk (the usual attribution for that quotation), but in fact three years prior, at the 1900 Pan-African Congress in London, explicitly framing the "color line" as an issue and a dialogue that crossed national boundaries.

In addition to the DuBois reference, Edwards also draws on Stuart Hall and the concept of articulation to develop a theoretical use of the French word décalage, referring to a shift in space or time or the gap that results from it, and applies the term to describe the way in which members of the black diaspora share similar conditions of oppression yet often find ourselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum—for example, black writers seeking solace from Jim Crow in Paris, while simultaneously Africans were struggling against French colonialism.

"[1] Writing in Crisis Magazine, Angela Ards said Edwards "has been hailed as one of the most promising emerging scholars of African American letters.