| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. By Jason R. Young. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. xiv, 258 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3279-1.)

Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World. By T. J. Desch Obi. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. xviii, 346 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-57003-718-4.)

When Sterling Stuckey published his seminal article "Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery" in 1968, little did he realize the impact he was about to make on the study of the "peculiar institution" in the United States. During the next fifteen years, a deluge of books and articles, many of them by the nation's most gifted historians, appeared showing how black culture traced its roots back to Africa. Not a few of these studies focused on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where even today there persist some unique African American cultural forms that could also be observed in the Caribbean and South America.

Today we know a great deal more about the transmission and evolution of cultural values from Africa to the New World and about how different ethnic groups from Benin, Biafra, the Gold Coast, Kongo-Angola, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the southeast coast, and the windward coast (present-day Liberia and Ivory Coast) were swept up in the Atlantic slave trade and arrived in the New World at different times in different regions. We know more about how Europeans viewed the beliefs, languages, and cultural values of these "outlandish" people as strange, exotic, and un-Christian.

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