Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
This is a work of major importance.
David Hackett Fischer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Washington's Crossing
Review
Pathbreaking study.
Paul E. Lovejoy, director, Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, York University
Review
An important contribution to Atlantic world history.
Joseph Inikori, University of Rochester
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
"Historians, anthropologists, and other scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean will benefit from this excellent study as we continue to try to understand what W.E.B. Du Bois rightly called 'the most inexcusable and despicable blot on modern human history.'"
-- African Studies Review
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
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.