Blacks and Latinos have numerous historical connections. The moors of North Africa occupied Spain from about 700-1400 A.D., about the time of the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Additionally, the slave trade which began with [Henry Louis Gates] the Navigator flourished from the 1440s, taking Africans into Portugal and Spain as servants. Many conquistadors of the New World brought with them free men of African ancestry. Finally, the Transatlantic Slave Trade sealed Afro-Hispanic connections as slaves intermingled voluntarily and involuntarily with their captors, creating variations in our color palate. Thus, our connections are longstanding. My point is that the African Diaspora experience, as was evidenced on Oscar night, is diverse and includes influences of blacks in Europe, Africa and all the Americas and the Caribbean. There are strands of the Diaspora in the Middle East, including Arab nations, and in places as unlikely as Mexico and China. So, blacks in America must begin to embrace our global heritage and we must also learn that our experiences are not superior but mere pieces of a wider tapestry of "colors." All are worth celebrating, researching and understanding. We are one great people cast to the winds by emigration and immigration, historical slavery, war, racial mixing and chance.
Addresses change and continuity in mortuary practices from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries within enslaved and free populations on the former Danish and current US Virgin Island of St. John. St. John's former residents created diverse burial sites for practical and symbolic reasons related to environment, kinship, socio-cultural politics, and religion. Reveals how people historically transformed identities of selves and communities as they perceived and commemorated the dead through meaningful mortuary sites and practices within dynamic local and regional contexts.
227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
In this article, I analyse patterns of classifications and naming of African "nations" in colonial Cuba. Based on parish records, I suggest possible interpretations of African patterns of classification, identities and social arrangements during the formation of Cuban plantations over the course of the eighteenth century. I discuss some of the methodological implications that can be explored regarding marriages of enslaved people in Cuba based on ecclesiastical sources, chiefly in the case of Guanabacoa. I have furthered the social/demographic analysis of "nations" in Cuba, underscoring how Africans could have been the agents of networks and alliances through organizational strategies and the formation of identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
