| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. By James Sidbury. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii, 291 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-532010-7.)

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, English-speaking former slaves and descendants of slaves contemplated how their own transition out of bondage might model an Atlantic world free of slavery, and in the process they became the first generation of black people to explicitly ponder an African identity. Countering the stigma that white westerners had affixed to blackness, emancipation's pioneers developed a language and projects aimed at redeeming all people in or with ancestral connections to Africa. In James Sidbury's organizing terms, blacks in the diaspora chose to affiliate with one another as historical victims of the slave trade or as co-religionists; in doing so, they often made the case for deeper filiative bonds on the presumption that all African peoples, regardless of ethnicity, shared a common heritage and would share a common fate.

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