COMMUNICATING AFRICANNESS THROUGH A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MUSIC, DANCE, VISUAL ARTS AND LITERARY WORKS OF AFRICAN BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA

This study investigates how Black people in the diaspora have retained and adapted their traditional art forms such as music, dance, visual arts, and literary works, as communication tools for expressing and negotiating Africanness within transnational contexts. Anchored in communication studies and African diaspora scholarship, the research adopts a content-analysis design to examine a purposive sample of creative productions, including Afro-beats, hip-hop fusions, diasporic visual arts and performance displays, as well as contemporary African diasporic literature. Through systematic coding and thematic analysis, the study identifies recurring communication patterns, symbols, and narrative motifs that convey identity, belonging, resistance, and cultural memory. The findings reveal that diasporic African artists and performers employ performance, imagery, movement, rhythm, and storytelling as multimodal languages that sustain cultural continuity while challenging Eurocentric representations. These artistic forms reimagine Africa as both a geographic reality and a symbolic homeland, enabling dispersed communities to articulate shared histories and collective aspirations. Furthermore, the creative expressions function as communicative acts of identity construction, allowing individuals and groups to negotiate hybrid cultural spaces while maintaining connections to ancestral traditions. The study concludes that the arts operate as powerful sites of intercultural dialogue, resistance, and solidarity, reaffirming the centrality of communication in preserving diasporic cohesion and transmitting African cultural consciousness across generations. Ultimately, this research contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on cultural communication, transnational identity formation, and the role of artistic expression in shaping global narratives of the African diaspora.