ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides area studies through author methodologically oriented article on bringing India into African diasporic studies as well as author's essay on restorative justice as a methodology. It discusses that Robert E. Park and his student Donald Pierson entering Brazil with preconceived ideas about white-black relations there and about Pierson actually living there for years shows how easy it is for researchers to develop blinders and continue to misunderstand what they are seeing, feeling, hearing, and touching. Transnationality encourages the examination of networks, movements, communities' ethnic and other cultural formations, and stratified orders that do not pay attention to sovereign state boundaries. The epistemological challenge of transnationality is to avoid either or myths such as the tendency for some scholars to claim that what matters most are transnational processes and structures rather than paying attention to nation-states.
