The term diaspora originates from a Latin or Greek word (diaspora in Latin, διασπορά in Greek) which refers to the Jewish people living outside of the nation of Israel (OED Online). It is related to the ancient Greek word διασπείρειν, meaning “to disperse.” The word diaspora is now much more broadly applied to “any group of people who have spread or become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin (OED Online).

In literature and cultural studies, diaspora (and its discipline, diaspora studies) has become a focal point for scholarly investigation, especially in the sphere of African-American studies. For example, Vanderbilt University launched their Callie House Center for the Study of Black Cultures and Politics in 2012, a research organization which highlights and sponsors scholarship in African American and Diaspora studies; the center was named after Callie House, a slave born in Tennessee in 1861 and a figure who championed reparations to slaves and their descendants during Reconstruction. 

African (and African American) diaspora is a tricky subject. Scholar Paul Zeleza calls diaspora 

a process, a condition, a space and a discourse: the continuous processes by which a diaspora is made, unmade and remade, the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself, the places where it is moulded and imagined, and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed.

If, for Zeleza, diaspora is a process, then for other scholars it is almost as significant as national affiliation or cultural identity. H. Adlai Murdoch highlights the reality of African dispersal into the New world:

....paradoxically what has undergirded the sameness of the black experience of transportation, transnationalism, and diaspora has been the similarity of first world perspectives regarding blacks and blackness.

Murdoch’s argument suggests how global power structures shape the continuity of diasporic experience. If blackness connects groups of people across geopolitical distances, that's in large part because the so-called first world has treated black people with remarkable consistency since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. One consequence of the identification with a global diaspora is that local black communities begin to take shape as if they were nations within nations—that is, social units simultaneously within and beyond their particular locality.

Gaines published his essay "Miss Jane and I" in special issue of Callaloo in 1978, not too long after the publication of The Autobiography of Jane PIttman itself. He writes of instances where his first readers and eventually even newspaper reporters, understood Jane Pittman, the heroine of the novel, to be a real person:

A representative of Newsweek asked me to send the editors of the magazine a picture of Miss Jane Pittman to be used with a review of the novel. I had to inform her that I could not, since Miss Jane is a creation of my imagination.

Others also mistook Pittman to be real, either a pseudonym or alias that Gaines had invented for someone or an actual person the book was based on:

One lady accused me of using a tape recorder, then calling the interview a novel after I had cut out all the inconsequential material. A good friend of mine who writes for one of the leading newspapers in San Fransisco feels that Miss Jane is definitely a novel, but he also feels that I must have, at some time in the past, interviewed my grandmother or my aunt who raised me when I lived in the South.

While Gaines has insisted in essays that Jane Pittman is a fictional creation, she might be more. Gaines has written that, for many of his stories (including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) that he spent his youth sitting on the porch and listening to people talk. There were no televisions in his childhood, and radios were difficult to come by. It is here that Gaines would gather the raw material, the grain and grit of historical realism, for his short stories and novels. 


Gaines, in his lived experience and his research, has managed to partially distill hundreds of stories, events, and anecdotes of African diaspora since the emancipation of the slaves in after the Civil War. When he mentions the "other old people in mind as well" he provides not only a link to his 1940s childhood, but to the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers that stretch back into a sliver of African diaspora. Returning to Zeleza, if diaspora is indeed a process, then that process of diasporic identity is chronicled, in a small way, through The Autobiography of Jane Pittman. Gaines created Pittman but did not invent all of her; he did not invent the real, historic events that also thread through the novel, and he did not necessarily invent every granular detail of Pittman's journey through her life. 

Gaines begins the novel with an introduction, of an editor seeking to interview Jane Pittman so that her knowledge and experience would, in some form, be preserved. Gaines' authorial motivations and the motivations of his fictional editor are the same: to gather and preserve the collection of disbursed, diasporic history. Gaines assembled that history and funneled it into one remarkable woman. The fact that the woman is fiction is immaterial. The Autobiography of Jane Pittman is her autobiography but is also, perhaps, the autobiography of one branch of the African American diaspora.