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Beginning with the migrations of Africans from the island of Madagascar into the United States during the nineteenth century, this chapter attempts to provide an alternative history of African negotiation of space and freedom in Western societies in which restrictive institutions such as slavery, racism, and other forms of inequalities have continued to affect the lives of black populations. By writing about the experiences of immigrants of Malagasy, Senegalese, and Caribbean origins into the United States or Canada, this collaborative chapter attempts to disrupt a narrow conception of Black Atlantic studies, which tends to focus on the experiences of only African Americans, failing to connect these experiences with those of other African-descended populations of the old and new Diasporas. Whether in Wilson-Fall’s work on Madagascar, Gooden’s on Canada, M’Baye’s on Senegal, the experiences of black immigrants into the Western world reveal ingenuous ways of circumventing stringent policies of racial and economic domination and control through subversive use of spirituality and communalism as tools of building economic power and cultural space.