Synopses & Reviews
Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade.
Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.
Review
"Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas is an important contribution to Atlantic world history. Its thesis on the contribution of African cultural elements, transmitted by enslaved Africans, to cultural development in the Americas is cogently developed, with the deployment of convincing evidence, and written in a scholarly style that is accessible to general readers and undergraduates.--(Joseph Inikori, University of Rochester)"
Review
"Hall's work offers a major contribution to the longstanding debate over the Africanness of slave culture in the Americas. . . . Hall rises to the challenge."
The Southern Quarterly
Review
"At the opening bell, Hall comes out swinging. . . . [She] writes with a passion that is regrettably absent from much of the new literature of African Slavery."
Florida Historical Quarterly
Review
"Important, providing a new template for critics as well as supporters, and opening up a new chapter in what is clearly a changing paradigm."
Journal of the Early Republic
Review
"An elegant and sensible appeal for collaborative scholarship and recognition of diversity and complexity in dealing with culture formation in the Americas."
Hispanic American Historical Review
Synopsis
Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on a lifetime of study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora, many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture.
Synopsis
Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on a lifetime of study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora, many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture.
Synopsis
"A relatively small book, whose size belies its importance. . . . [Hall] adopt[s] a hemispheric perspective that places the North American experience in its proper context."
Southern Cultures "Hall's work offers a major contribution to the longstanding debate over the Africanness of slave culture in the Americas. . . . Hall rises to the challenge."
The Southern Quarterly "At the opening bell, Hall comes out swinging. . . . [She] writes with a passion that is regrettably absent from much of the new literature of African Slavery."
Florida Historical Quarterly "Important, providing a new template for critics as well as supporters, and opening up a new chapter in what is clearly a changing paradigm."
Journal of the Early Republic "An elegant and sensible appeal for collaborative scholarship and recognition of diversity and complexity in dealing with culture formation in the Americas."
Hispanic American Historical Review
About the Author
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is Distinguished Research Fellow, Southern University System, and International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora at York University, Toronto. She is author of a CD and website database on Afro-Louisiana history and genealogy as well as of several books, including Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century and Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba.
Table of Contents
ContentsPreface: Truth and Reconciliation
Acknowledgments
1. Gold, God, Race, and Slaves
2. Making Invisible Africans Visible: Coasts, Ports, Regions, and Ethnicities
3. The Clustering of African Ethnicities in the Americas
4. Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea
5. Lower Guinea: Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, and Slave Coast
6. Lower Guinea: The Bight of Biafra
7. Bantulands: West Central Africa and Mozambique
Conclusion: Implications for Culture Formation in the Americas
Appendix: Prices of Slaves by Ethnicity and Gender in Louisiana, 1719-1820
Notes
Bibliography
Index