For some time now, I have taught a doctoral seminar on “Exile and Diaspora,” a course that aims to deconstruct and analyze the confluences, distinctions, and influences across the intellectual orientations of Black studies and postcolonial theory. Though originally titled “Readings in Exile,” its first cohort of students realized it was in actuality a conversation between various states of exile and the discordant nature of diaspora. Exile: that state often conditioned, as Edward Said once cogently lamented, by the improbable prospect of return to one’s native land. Diaspora, which Stuart Hall proposed in African-descended contexts as a discursive form of relation, manifest “as much through…differences as through…similarities.” Though not a hard and fast distinction across so many and varied exilic and diasporic narratives and experiences, which often dovetail into and across one another, my students’ observations that the accounts of Black USian, European, Caribbean, and other forcibly dispersed and displaced people of African descent we encountered (including on the African continent itself) theorized a practice of entering into diasporic belonging with other Black people that could not be so simply read as expressions of exile alone. These entries into diasporic belonging exceed borders and citizenship, cross language and cultural expression, and harness immeasurably heterogeneous historical and political contexts and strategies for how one’s liberation will take shape. The exile’s desire to return is improbable precisely for the purpose that diasporic relation serves: the place from which they came, the land that was stolen from them and from which they were stolen, no longer exists as it was because of its taking. As this first group of students recognized these patterns, I renamed and refigured the seminar in order to reconcile with the complexity of these comparative theoretical and experiential frameworks, which do not simply mark the long impacts of varied processes of displacement and dispossession, but also make meaning for how displaced and dispossessed people throughout the world imagine re/turning to their communities, their cultures, and their freedom in the absence—and perhaps the impossibility—of return to place.