I've been in the Caribbean for most of the summer. It's been great thinking about the Diaspora and preparing for my classes there. Sometimes it feels like 'home' and I don't have the same 'rootless feeling' that I get when I am in the States or the UK. Being there makes me consider how one's geographical location affects spatial thinking.

Travel really gives you a different perspective on life. I always find that when I am in transit, maybe sitting in an airport, or mid-flight that I have the most acute revelations about my own own life and my relationship to others. There's something about being in that space that provides you with a certain objectivity – perhaps a way of just stepping away from yourself and your circumstances and seeing yourself more clearly – at least this is what I have always thought.

It's 2007 and this year we celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery – that's a long time in the scheme of things, and numerous generations since the Diaspora's African ancestors were forcibly brought to the New World as slaves.