Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas - by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Paperback)

About the Book

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

Book Synopsis

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 Quotes

"[Hall's] book is about getting the story right -- making the marginalized more visible by highlighting historically their crucial role 'in the formation of cultures throughout the Americas.' . . . The book is a trove of new insights into African ethnic identity that challenge the earlier belief in the fragmented nature of Africans enslaved in the Western Hemisphere and the little influence they supposedly had on particular regions." -- Multicultural Review

"[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

"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

"Hall has successfully constructed a comprehensive and detailed consideration of the transatlantic slave trade that succeeds on many fronts and at many levels. . . . This work is an outstanding introduction to both the sources available on the slave trade and the scholarship produced from these sources. . . . The book will appeal to nonspecialists as well as specialists. . . . It is likely to inspire further works in this vein beyond the discipline of history." -- Journal of Southern History

"Hall has written an innovative history of important but sometimes neglected matters. The questions she raises about African ethnicity in the New World, and about slave historiography, merit debate and answers." -- North Carolina Historical 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

"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

"In her effort at 'restoring the links, ' Hall's study encompasses four centuries of Atlantic slave trading and underscores the historical reality that continuity and change go hand in hand." -- Journal of African American History

"This powerful new book is the product of more than twenty years of archival research on several continents and in four languages. It synthesizes the best of the new work and, in a variety of ways, charts directions for future scholarship. . . . Hall's book deserves the widest possible readership." -- Journal of American History

"Thought-provoking. . . . A landmark book about African slavery in the Americas that challenges historians and genealogists to engage a whole world of transcontinental, multi-lingual scholarship that may be unknown to students of American slavery (like this reviewer) who may have immersed themselves largely in the historiography of the Old South." -- Afrigeneas