The University of North Carolina Press

248 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 6 figs., 23 tables, 7 maps, append., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-2973-8

Published: September 2005

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5862-2

Published: August 2007

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas

Restoring the Links

By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

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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.

About the Author

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is senior research fellow at Tulane University, professor emerita of history at Rutgers University, and International Advisory Board Member of the Harriet Tubman Resource Center on the African Diaspora at York University, Toronto. She is author of several books as well as a CD and website database on Afro-Louisiana history and genealogy.

Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Could stimulate important future research. The book is a reminder that scholarship may depend more on the sources used than on the 'truth' or the 'facts.'. . . Recommended."
--Choice

"[This] ambitious study introduces new paradigms, methodologies, and sources of the complex cultural evolution of the African diaspora and convincingly challenges current assumptions and conclusions. . . . Everyone who want to understand the cultural meaning history of the African diaspora should read this book."
--Register of Kentucky Historical Society