Book Review

Comparative/World

How best to understand the historical experiences and identities of peoples of African descent in the Americas is the common query in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod's edited collection. The eighteen essays, divided into four parts, explore how peoples of African descent have shaped and been shaped by the developing Atlantic world since the 1500s. Except for Earl Lewis's opening essay, "To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas" (which first appeared in the American Historical Review [June 1995]), the collected pieces represent revised papers from an international symposium that Michigan State University hosted in April 1995.	1
In search of more serviceable paradigms to relocate Africa and its descendants from the periphery to the core of the modern Atlantic world, the broad themes of the parts—Comparative Diaspora Historiography; Identity and Culture; Domination and Resistance; Geo-Social History and the Atlantic World—suggest shared challenges and confrontations. Slavery and emancipation dominate, figuring in the titles of ten of the pieces.	2
The second part, treating identity and culture, is the most coherent in the collection. Allison Blakely initiates the part by tracing Europeans' creation of the racial vocabulary of black identity. He concludes that culture, not color, has marked the real problem of the differential treatment labeled racism. Yet is not culture merely another trope, albeit one more complex than color? Is it not clear that the wars of the color line have been and continue to be culture wars? The battle in significant part has been for self-determination that begins with self-identification.	3
Three pieces in succession after Blakely's localize the self-identity struggle. Dwayne E. Williams shows how Portuguese-speaking immigrants from the Cape Verde archipelago off the West African coast came to the United States in waves that brought differing self-identities and received differing identities. Kim D. Butler traces Afro-Brazilians' post-abolition struggle in the cities of São Paulo and Salvador to undermine imposed identities and to construct their own from a shared African cultural heritage. Philip A. Howard further details the battle to control identity and to use it in a strategy to divide and unite peoples by color and caste in Cuba from 1878 to 1895.	4
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's contribution closes the five-essay second part. Using as examples Nancy Prince of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Mary Seacole of Kingston, Jamaica, Terborg-Penn locates gender within the identity struggle and displays how "women's experiences related not only to gender, but to differential relationships of class, color, language, and power" (p. 159). While sharing in the identity theme, Terborg-Penn's suggestive piece stands in stark isolation that spotlights prevailing female exclusion and gender segregation while promising fresh perspectives from cross-cultural studies that add understanding of female experience.	. . .