| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Dylan C. Penningroth. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. x, 310. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

It is easy to romanticize slave families and slave communities, which seem to present historians with a seductively heroic and, in many ways, quintessentially American narrative of struggle, survival, and even triumph over systematic subjugation and intense hardship. Indeed, many of the recurring and most provocative areas of scholarly debate in nineteenth-century African American history reflect such a narrative, focusing as they so often do on how enslaved families and communities were created and functioned within dialectics of accommodation and resistance, oppression and autonomy, or acculturation and African cultural "retentions." Yet as Dylan C. Penningroth argues, such analyses not only presume a false unity among African Americans (and Africans, for that matter) but work from the assumption that black lives are best understood in terms of their relations to white people and white power rather than on their own terms. By probing how African Americans gave meaning to and understood connections between kinship and property, Penningroth instead manages to make the heroic narrative and the paradigmatic debates seem flat and simplistic without ever denying either the brutalities of white supremacy or the import and the power of black family and community life for individual and collective dignity, strength, and pride both in slavery and beyond.

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