African Musicians in the Atlantic World - (New World Studies) by Mary Caton Lingold

About the Book

"This book connects the history of music to the history of slavery in the Americas"--

Book Synopsis

Music, that fundamental form of human expression, is one of the most powerful cultural continuities fostered by enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. The roots of so much of the music beloved around the world today are drawn directly from the men and women carried across the Atlantic in chains, from the west coast of Africa to the shores of the so-called New World. This important new book bridges African diaspora studies, music studies, and transatlantic and colonial American literature to trace the lineage of African and African diasporic musical life in the early modern period.

Mary Caton Lingold meticulously analyzes surviving sources, especially European travelogues, to recover the lives of African performers, the sounds they created, and the meaning their musical creations held in Africa and later for enslaved communities in the Caribbean and throughout the plantation Americas. The book provides a rich history of early African sound and a revelatory analysis of the many ways that music shaped enslavement and colonization in the Americas.

Review Quotes

A rich, well-written and well-researched book on a novel and important topic. African Musicians in the Atlantic World will make a major contribution to multiple fields, including music history, Atlantic studies, colonial Caribbean history and literature, as well as studies of transatlantic slavery, the African diaspora, and Black culture in the Americas. It is full of fascinating archival discoveries and insights.

--Lisa Voigt, Yale University, author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds

Mary Caton Lingold has given us a deeply researched and fascinating narrative about the very beginnings of the musicking of Africans in the Atlantic world. Focusing mainly on the anglophone Caribbean, and the American South, but also West and West Central Africa, the book opens with vivid records of performance in Atlantic Africa before shifting to track the evolution of musical life on US plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries. The greatest strength of this book lies in Lingold's depiction of the sonic experiences of enslaved Africans as they entertained within their own communities. This is real folks' history, richly told from the perspective of what Fred Moten calls the undercommons. With a keen ear toward the hidden transcripts embedded within the strata of history, Lingold draws extensively on European travel accounts, as well as the letters of settlers, traders, colonial officials and missionaries. This is a landmark effort which is sure to spark further interest in a fascinating period in the evolution of the musical culture of the Black Atlantic. Highly recommended.

--Corey Harris, award-winning musician

An engaging, well-conceptualized, and well-argued analysis of a multidisciplinary subject. She succeeds admirably in her promise to deliver a virtual album of music to demonstrate her points. . . . Lingold's sources include material culture, written literature, and engravings from travel accounts, but her method is distinctive because she goes beyond these historical texts and analyzes each chapter's topic within the framework of modern performance practices, a kind of applied anthropology of performance. . . . Lingold explains music in a manner that is accessible to curious non-experts as well as to practitioners. Going further, the book would be useful to students as well as to specialists in music, anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, and literature, and because the individual chapters are fairly self-contained, classes could even read one at a time.--William & Mary Quarterly

Her close reading reconstructs the multisensory sound, vibration, dance, and ritual that shaped nearly every sphere of life for Africans and their descendants on both sides of the Atlantic. Limited sources still contain brilliant detail of what Africans created under slavery. . . By reading familiar sources alongside this new archive, Lingold expands our knowledge of African and Afro- creativity under enslavement and adds to the argument that enslaved people and their culture did indeed survive slavery.--Public Books

About the Author

Mary Caton Lingold is Associate Professor of English and Director of the PhD Program in Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University