Judith A. Byfield is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, teaching African and Caribbean history. She is coeditor of Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (2010) and author of The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890 1940 (2002). She is a former president of the African Studies Association (2011) and is on the editorial board of the Blacks in the Diaspora series.