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Amiri Baraka coins the phrase “the changing same” in his 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America to describe the loose connections between contemporary jazz and African music. Teasing out the ramifications of a people being relocated, experiencing acculturation, or fighting appropriation, Baraka positions Black art and music as vehicles for safeguarding memory and combatting universalism.

Following these concerns, this panel asks how today’s artists navigate phenomena of (im)migration, acculturation, and appropriation in the United States of post-1980, as narratives surrounding American identity, history, and diversity have come to vary, often dramatically, between national, regional, and local discourses in recent years. Of particular interest are the changing social, artistic and visual cultures of locales along not only the East and West coasts, but also the Great Lakes, Mississippi River, and Gulf Coast. Emerging as new spaces of diaspora—from Detroit’s growing Muslim population to Central American immigration to the Gulf South following Hurricane Katrina—such locales have assumed an increasingly assertive role in American social politics. At the same time, Americans have reassessed and revised narratives surrounding the nation’s defining historical events, from the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the Civil War and Jim Crow Era.

What are the impacts of Diaspora aesthetics for indigenous, majority, and/or other minority populations in today’s America? How have exchanges, movements and displacements wrought by recent waves of (im)migration to these cities impacted “American” aesthetics and cultural production in new ways since 1980? What are contemporary artists’ strategies in addressing “the changing same”?